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  1. - Top - End - #1081
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    Trust Meschlum to rewrite the entire system in only two paragraphs . . .

  2. - Top - End - #1082
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    Quote Originally Posted by Dragnar View Post
    Hmm... Well Xefas, you seem to have experience with a decent variety of RPGs. So, which one(s) do you think are the best put together mechanically? Just curious.
    It's hard to say. Don't Rest Your Head, Fiasco, Apocalypse World, Free Market, Burning Empires, Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, Burning Wheel (Revised or Gold), Mouse Guard - these are what immediately spring to mind.

    They may spring to me just because of my taste, though. I have experience with them, and they're all-around solid. (I know Vincent Baker considers Poison'd to be the pinnacle of his game design, even above Dogs in the Vineyard and Apocalypse World. I think he's loony, but whatever.)

    There're games that are a bit more 'out there', in terms of what they do. They're great games both conceptually and design-wise, but I don't expect everyone to want to play them.
    Blazing Rose - the first romance RPG.
    1001 Nights - you roleplay people that are roleplaying as other people.
    Grey Ranks - crushingly depressing game about child soldiers in occupied Poland.
    Steal Away Jordan - you play African slaves in the pre-Civil-War American south.
    Silence Keeps Me a Victim - work through your (the player's) childhood trauma with deeply unsettling imagery.
    Tales of The Fisherman's Wife - sort of what you're thinking it is.

    And I have to give a sub-category to well designed but very light games (die in a fire, RISUS): Primetime Adventures, Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, Kagematsu (I would actually consider running a PbP game of this here, if Lix would be our Kagematsu =P), In a Wicked Age, Dread, Cthulhu Dark.

    I'm probably missing some, but that's my info dump off the top of my head, as it is. And suddenly I realize I didn't mention Lady Blackbird, which might be a great game, but I might also just have an insane fascination for it. It's freely available on the internet, like several of the games I've mentioned (link), so you're welcome to judge for yourself. It might be awful, I just...I just don't know.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kyeudo View Post
    My own games have had few problems getting the system to do what we want.
    This is what's so often the hard part to explain, but I'll give it a try and hope you believe me. You can 'get' anything to 'do' anything. I can force Monopoly, Parcheesi, or Settlers of Catan to have courtly intrigue. But that doesn't make it a roleplaying game about courtly intrigue.

    The reason it's hard to explain to people that are only familiar with D&D, is because they're so used to shoving what they want into a game that doesn't do what they want. D&D is a game about violent hobos wandering around murdering and stealing things. But they want it to be heroic, Tolkienesque fantasy, so they force that into the game.

    And then they wonder why they have so many problems. And it's not Wizard imbalance. I'm talking about all those threads you get constantly about "Help me punish my DM/Players/Family", or "Huge Rant About DM Fiat Incoming", or "Why is everyone in my town a stupid ****weasel?! - Rant on PvP", or "Is It Okay To Stab People That Take Out Their Cellphone?" and so on and so forth. All these things are a symptom of people playing a poorly designed game that is not designed for what they want. (See my previously linked game theory video, specifically the part about "The Game Makes The Community")

    When you play a game that is well designed for the task you want, not only can you do what you want, it's easy. It just happens, and it's (difficult to believe, I know) more enjoyable.

    Think of every moment in an Exalted game where you, not necessarily were having a problem, but that you (personally) weren't actively being consumed by joy. Those moments are the difference between a good and bad game. I played D&D for many years, through many editions, and with many groups and people. And it was fun. We kicked down doors, we slayed demons, we dined with kings, ventured to the ends of the earth, gazed upon things so wondrous and evil that it shook us to our core, and threw open the gates of heaven to give the gods a big ol' middle finger.

    That was fun. Of course that was fun. Those parts are going to be fun. So why did I start playing Burning Wheel? Because those parts were also fun in Burning Wheel, but so was every single moment since we sat in our chairs. (Cellphone? DS? You couldn't force me to take those out in the middle of a Burning Wheel session.) It was a transcendent experience that engaged me like nothing else. I could not possibly have imagined what it would be like until I played it. I know this because I fought tooth and nail (almost literally) to not play it. I defended D&D to the very last vestige of nostalgia that was in me. And it could not hold.

    And now I cannot play D&D. It's akin to going over to a friend's house, and he's still using Internet Explorer and has no ad-block. But times a thousand. Slaying the dragon is still fun. But those moments between dragons grate on me. Waiting for the fun is like claws in my mind, because I know it's not necessary.

    Exalted is the same. Slaying the God of Things That Cannot Be Easily Slayed is cool, but the hours leading up to that point are not that sort of all-consuming enjoyment that you get from Apocalypse World or Don't Rest Your Head. And it's an unreasonable amount of work for the GM to even get to that point, besides.

  3. - Top - End - #1083
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    So, it is now official. Thanks to the Games of the Wyld, Raksha really can do anything, because it is entirely possible that they are/have been/will be doing everything.
    Especially with some extra use of Fall of Night Shadows the Truth and such.

    Meschlum has made this thread, and all possible others obsolete except insofar as they discuss Meschlum and Meschlum-type works.
    Or Devil-Tigers, who are capable of doing things the Games can't. By definition, in fact.
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    I'd go and dedicate the best song in the world to meschlum, but I think he's already statted it up as an Oneiromancy.
    It is inevitable, of course, that persons of epicurean refinement will in the course of eternity engage in dealings with those of... unsavory character. Record well any transactions made, and repay all favors promptly.. (Thanks to Gnomish Wanderer for the Toreador avatar! )

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  5. - Top - End - #1085
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    Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
    Kagematsu (I would actually consider running a PbP game of this here, if Lix would be our Kagematsu =P)
    I was going to say I'd be up for that, but the fact that it explicitly says a girl has to play kagematsu who is male annoys and offends me implicitly. I don't like the idea of a game where half the population can't do part of the game.
    Also I don't play guys.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lix Lorn View Post
    I was going to say I'd be up for that, but the fact that it explicitly says a girl has to play kagematsu who is male annoys and offends me implicitly. I don't like the idea of a game where half the population can't do part of the game.
    Also I don't play guys.
    The point of the game is to explore gender roles in modern culture, and lampshade the fact that so many gamers have a problem with folks playing a gender other than their own. It's poking fun at people like this guy who won't allow a man to play a female character - by having a woman play the male lead, and having men play all the female supporting characters.

    It's doing the opposite of why you're offended.

  7. - Top - End - #1087
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    Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
    It's doing the opposite of why you're offended.
    Although the assumption that such a rejection is required to be mandatory to make it happen is itself offensive.
    I would be more offended if it weren't regrettably accurate more than pleases me.
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  8. - Top - End - #1088
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    I bargeth in, pretty much only to marvel at Xefas and partake in maintaining meschlum's Cult rating. Xefas, since you know a lot about tabletop mechanics, how would one go about designing a system for a given task?

    Let's say we wanted a cinematic over-the-top game, such as Exalted or its low-IQ bother, Scion. Right now, the stunt dice system doesn't work as well as you'd want. My guess is something like giving N motes for every stunt, then adding sucesses instead of dice, which can fail. Instead of 1-, 2-, and 3-die stunts, they would be 0-, 1-, and 2- success stunts.

    Or, hey, it's sort of assumed that if you're stunting, you're doing something you're good at anyway, and you should succeed. And you can't stunt unless you have >X dice. So, instead, let's ramp up the dramatic editing that gets to be done. A minor edit for a 1-die stunt (a spray of blood), a useful one for 2-die (your backflip lands you on top of a panicked mook's shoulders), and something very helpful for 3-die (your flying tackle not just knocks the general off his mount, but you're laying on the horse now, which is charging into the general's army).

    The dice pool + difficulty system should be dialed back to how it was in White Wolf's first game: V:tM. Difficulty is the die number you want, not how many successes you need. It was elegant: since you can only get up to 10 dice usually, and there are a lot of opposed rolls, the difficulty system and d10s were made so that you can roll against someone's dice pool, without them rolling too. Now, for Exalted, dice pools are measured in kilograms, so instead of asking for a single die at or above the Difficulty, require two (three?) of them. Xd10b2, hope none of them are below difficulty. This lets difficulty scale up to Solar levels--low numbers for mortals, high numbers for wuxia, 10 for "I'm going to shoot this arrow at the moon." Excellencies would decrease difficulty by 1, increase the second-largest die's result, or reroll.

    Thoughts? Or just scrap dice pool/attribute+ability, and if so, what makes that whole system unfit? You seem to disapprove of attributes.

  9. - Top - End - #1089
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    Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
    Kagematsu (I would actually consider running a PbP game of this here, if Lix would be our Kagematsu =P)
    I'm actually trying to set up a game at college, though i'm not getting much male interest.
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  10. - Top - End - #1090
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    Tavar, if You make one on PbP give me sign. Sounds like lulz.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kazyan View Post
    Xefas, since you know a lot about tabletop mechanics, how would one go about designing a system for a given task?
    This is an important question, one that is very involved and fiercely contended, but at it's most basic level, Game Design is Mind Control.

    When you design a sub-system, you're looking for a behavior. "Elegance" is not in the mechanic itself, but in how that mechanic evokes the desired behavior.

    To give an example, D&D wants you to kill things. How does it achieve this? You are rewarded with the only two currencies in the game, XP and Loot, for 'defeating' opponents. However, it is far easier to kill than it is to take someone alive, there is no explicit downside to killing, and the vast majority of mechanics your character has improves their ability to kill things.

    You do not, for instance, get rewarded for deciding to become a turnip farmer. Being a turnip farmer is kind of difficult and boring and does not have a lot of mechanics attached to it. Therefore you do not see a lot of turnip farming in D&D.

    The fact that you roll d20s and add a number to kill things is completely irrelevant. If you rolled a dice pool vs a difficulty number, you would still be telling a story about killing things, and if you drew cards from a deck, you would still be telling a story about killing things. There would still be no turnip farming.

    So, part 2: How do you design Exalted?

    Figure out how you want people to behave. How do you want Solars to behave? Reinforce those behaviors.

    The elegance is in how you layer these behaviors. For instance, if you want Solars to be overall good people who end up doing a lot of good things but then tragically hurt everyone they were trying to help in a fit of madness, then you need mechanics to support that.

    However, the least elegant way to do that would be to write in a rulebook "Every time you act like a good person and end up doing a lot of good things but then tragically hurt everyone you were trying to help in a fit of madness, you get +5 Doohickey Points."

    An elegant version would inspire the players to act that way without explicitly telling them to.

    To give an example from another game, Dogs in the Vineyard inspires the characters to all eventually become grizzled guilt-ridden bastards. And it does so without ever even hinting at this being a desired goal (in fact, on the surface, it seems to do the opposite). If you read the book without ever playing or talking to someone who had played, there's a good chance you wouldn't anticipate that behavior at all.

    So, how do you make Exalted play like Exalted? Well, if I knew that, I'd just write the damn thing.

    But, as a hint - if you want cinematic, nail-biting, "Holy balls that was the coolest thing ever" combat, you need to simplify and abstract the hell out of it. Look at stuff like Mouse Guard and Fate, which have a decent amount of abstraction and simplicity without going all the way. My one foray into Fatexalted yielded epic combat the likes of which I could never dream of getting using Exalted.
    Last edited by Xefas; 2011-11-12 at 04:51 PM.

  12. - Top - End - #1092
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    well then, I need to find a/the Fatexalted system and play it, if you say that its that good.
    I'm also on discord as "raziere".


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    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    well then, I need to find a/the Fatexalted system and play it, if you say that its that good.
    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.
    Last edited by Xefas; 2011-11-12 at 05:34 PM.

  14. - Top - End - #1094
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
    It's doing the opposite of why you're offended.
    Not quite.
    It's doing it for the opposite reasons of why I'm offended, but it's still offending me, so from my viewpoint here it's failed. When you say something insulting satirically you have to make it obvious that it's satirical.
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    Xefas, from what You are saying seems like Wushu fits Exalted themes moar than standard WoD rule-set.
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    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.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Rikandur Azebol View Post
    Xefas, from what You are saying seems like Wushu fits Exalted themes moar than standard WoD rule-set.
    Wushu has some good ideas, definitely.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kazyan View Post
    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.
    "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Who I assume was quoting Civilization IV )

    When I say "Fatexalted wasn't great", it's for other reasons than the combat. Combat was great (barring a little clean up here and there). I think something similar to its combat system is perfect for Exalted.

    It fell short in other ways, and it's hard for me to completely articulate how. It needed a certain tuning. If you look at other Fate hacks, the good ones have everything crooked slightly so, and have that one extra thing that constantly reminds you that you aren't playing Fate - you're playing Icons, or you're playing Dresden Files, or you're playing Diaspora.

    It needs an injection of setting, is what I'm saying. While we played, we sort of gave the setting to the system, whereas it should've been the system giving us the setting. There was an Abyssal in our party, but the mechanics did not really differentiate between them being an Abyssal or just an especially irate member of another Exaltation. I was an Infernal, but if I hadn't expended significant effort to club everyone over the head with that fact, I could've just been a very large and pyromaniacal dude in a skirt.

    (Also, I think the skill system could use some tinkering.)

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lix Lorn View Post
    I was going to say I'd be up for that, but the fact that it explicitly says a girl has to play kagematsu who is male annoys and offends me implicitly. I don't like the idea of a game where half the population can't do part of the game.
    So, you don't like social experiments? I mean, in a normal game, I wouldn't like the rule, but in a game meant to explore Social gender roles, or something? I wouldn't, because there's a specific reason for the characters to work that way.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tavar View Post
    So, you don't like social experiments? I mean, in a normal game, I wouldn't like the rule, but in a game meant to explore Social gender roles, or something? I wouldn't, because there's a specific reason for the characters to work that way.
    This seems to be somewhat mis-attributive.

    It's not that changing gender roles is bad. There's a character in a game I really, really want to be female, but I can't do it even though I want to without introducing way too much complaining than I'm willing to deal with.

    It's that the game forces it.
    (And the fact that internally, it's still a MALE character being supported by FEMALE characters. Why is that specification necessary inside the game?)

    Basically, switching it up is good. Forcing it is somewhat insulting. The fact that inside the game, the gender roles seem to be male hero with female support means that it's not quite as justified as it would seem.


    That's as I understand it; I have only what's been provided in this thread.
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    Quote Originally Posted by Tavar View Post
    So, you don't like social experiments? I mean, in a normal game, I wouldn't like the rule, but in a game meant to explore Social gender roles, or something? I wouldn't, because there's a specific reason for the characters to work that way.
    To be perfectly honest, I've explored gender roles more than I ever wanted to already. I just want to be a normal, stereotypical girl most of the time. Albeit a nerdy one.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lix Lorn View Post
    To be perfectly honest, I've explored gender roles more than I ever wanted to already. I just want to be a normal, stereotypical girl most of the time. Albeit a nerdy one.
    Well, I can respect that.

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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    Xefas, you seem to be assuming Exalted is intended to be some sort of epic combat/intrigue/whatever game as its principal purpose. If it was, yes, it would be failing to do so. But that seems a rather minor goal of the game design. Exalted is more stunt-conducive than D&D and WoD, I think we can agree. Where we differ is assuming it was meant to go further than that.

    In my mind, Exalted is primarily a game about characters in a sandboxified JRPG. You live in a world in which magic is discretized and countable, in which the principal "things you can do" come in specific, identifiable units. A world in which everyone is a D&D Wizard, only a Spellcraft check away from classifying what the other person is doing. A world that discourages certain sorts of creative solutions to problems in favor of progressing through a precise tree of linked abilities. A world in which the creatures that created the world are nothing more than such trees of abilities. A world in which you really can pick the right series of abilities to accomplish anything you care to.

    And finally, a world that deconstructs this. A world in which people are still fragile despite damage being tuned to the concept of hit points and not injuries. Where hacking the system has resulted in warping the gods and eliminating an entire class of being from living memory, where virtues, as principally game mechanical entities, are not always self-evidently virtuous.

    For me, Exalted is like Erfworld, just as an RPG and not Turn-Based-Strategy. There are design choices (as mentioned above, discretization of motes and Primordials being living charm trees) that make it look very much like this was part of the design intent, not an accident of bad game design. And it seems very unlikely that FATE or the like can replicate that.
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    yea I mean, I could try to make a FATE-hack, but…I'd still have to put in the charms and such, and motes, and willpower, and sorcery….the mechanics are very interlocked with the setting, which is a very different direction than most games because most games have mechanics that are segregated from the fluff, y'know the old "gameplay and story segregation" thing. Exalted doesn't really have that. Its why people still play the original system even though there is like what? two to five different system fixes for it? more?
    point is, unlike most games, to change the mechanics is to sorta mess with the fluff is tightly locked in with and vice-versa.

    I mean just try to figure out how to express the power differences between a solar, a dragon-blooded and a mortal, without resorting to Exalted's system. try making charms without Exalted's system. there ain't many that come close
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    Basically, every Exalt is a Wizard.

    Solars get their spells four levels earlier, celestials two levels early, Dragon-Blooded at the normal level, and even the best mortals tend to have a progression no better than, say, a Paladin.

    Spirits probably qualify as Bards.

    It does use a mana-based rather than Vancian system, of course, but the idea of having huge numbers of possible spells/charms, and that if the right one is available it will usually win any situation, and the ability to make more... These are all present.
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    congratulations, you've given the Exalts too much flexibility and now they can all reach level 20, all of them can learn the same spells and use them however they want, except now they don't have perfect defenses anymore, and now all of them can learn stuff like Locate City Bomb, thus you now have at best, equally powerful 12900 demigods that all destroy each other. because "Exalt" includes "Dragon-Blooded". you just broke the setting. a hundred times over.

    Exalted is a setting where, they not only have all these powers that can do all the things they- they actually go and do the logical conclusions of the system and tools they have, everyone is a wizard, equals everyone blows everything up.
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    Alternatively, the actual spell lists aren't the same as DnD.
    Which they aren't.

    But in terms of ability use, if one adds separate spell lists and prerequisite spells, that seems like a fairly accurate representation.
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    which then, it isn't actually DnD anymore. now your making something custom.
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    Quote Originally Posted by Urpriest View Post
    Xefas, you seem to be assuming Exalted is intended to be some sort of epic combat/intrigue/whatever game as its principal purpose. If it was, yes, it would be failing to do so. But that seems a rather minor goal of the game design. Exalted is more stunt-conducive than D&D and WoD, I think we can agree. Where we differ is assuming it was meant to go further than that.

    In my mind, Exalted is primarily a game about characters in a sandboxified JRPG. You live in a world in which magic is discretized and countable, in which the principal "things you can do" come in specific, identifiable units. A world in which everyone is a D&D Wizard, only a Spellcraft check away from classifying what the other person is doing. A world that discourages certain sorts of creative solutions to problems in favor of progressing through a precise tree of linked abilities. A world in which the creatures that created the world are nothing more than such trees of abilities. A world in which you really can pick the right series of abilities to accomplish anything you care to.
    That's the saddest thing I've heard all day.

    But I would be interested in a poll to see how many people think Exalted should primarily be about "epic combat/intrigue/whatever" or whether it should be primarily about 'counting units' and 'discouraging certain sorts of creative solutions in favor of progressing through a precise tree of linked abilities'.

    Because, I would personally be shocked if the majority of people picked up their first Exalted book thinking "I'd really like to spend hours doing math and cataloging ability trees that will restrict my creativity", instead of thinking something closer to what I was thinking - "I'd really like to play a dude who fights thousand-limbed elder gods in confrontations that level whole nations in their wake."

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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
    That's the saddest thing I've heard all day.

    But I would be interested in a poll to see how many people think Exalted should primarily be about "epic combat/intrigue/whatever" or whether it should be primarily about 'counting units' and 'discouraging certain sorts of creative solutions in favor of progressing through a precise tree of linked abilities'.

    Because, I would personally be shocked if the majority of people picked up their first Exalted book thinking "I'd really like to spend hours doing math and cataloging ability trees that will restrict my creativity", instead of thinking something closer to what I was thinking - "I'd really like to play a dude who fights thousand-limbed elder gods in confrontations that level whole nations in their wake."
    I'm with Xefas on the point of Exalted being about being epic to the epic power. I think Urpriest has a minor point that Exalted is supposed to be a sandbox game, so the system shouldn't be hyperfocused on just combat or intrigue or any one thing, but I think he misses the major point about Exalted being about doing what you want to do. If you don't like something about Exalted, you are supposed to change it. It's Rule #2, after all, right after Have Fun.

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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion Thread VII: Playground Eternal Essence

    Quote Originally Posted by Kyeudo View Post
    I'm with Xefas on the point of Exalted being about being epic to the epic power.
    Personally, I never saw it. In my experience, Exalted has been mostly about being worried about a million things and how everything you do has unexpected ramifications and therefore a pretty good chance to have really nasty unintended consequences. Playing Exalted is an exercise in prudence, calculation, and prediction. You can't act rashly or you may well screw everything forever. Balancing your power against everyone else's, not be too rash because that'll just drown you in bad consequences, not get into fights if you can avoid it because you die from a sneeze, and so on. I tend to be in more of a perpetual state of "oh **** I'm going to die" in Exalted than I am even in Dark Heresy. It's very deconstructive - "you have these great powers!... but if you mess up or try to overextend you're still really, really dead. Being powerful doesn't mean you shouldn't be veeeeeery careful".

    When I just want epic dudes beating on each other, Exalted would be rather low in my list of choices .
    Last edited by Drascin; 2011-11-14 at 06:56 AM.

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