Who here plays Exalted?

[Lord Raziere]

You know, my favorite part of the old defunct general-Exalted thread was these examples of how you can create literally anything with an inventive enough application of faery magic.

yeah, if you learned one of the most obscure books in the edition and all of its errata. for a splat, that most Exalted players don't care about. trust me I've made a four page self-cheat sheet to understand that system and I completely forgot how it works and stopped caring that I don't know how it works long ago. if I want to create anything I've got simpler more easily understood, more widely used systems to do that. and I'm pretty sure meschlum is the only person in the world I've seen who cares enough to use it to the point of mastery. I mean sure its great that it can do that and that mesch loves showing it off, but its pretty impractical all things considered.

[Rockphed]

Ahem.

Dahal Meris, Exemplar of Earthly Tedium

Ah, Meschlum! God of Faerie wonders. We have been too long without your grace.

(Add 1 to your cult rating)

[Grod_The_Giant]

Yeah, and the powers of at least one Exalted have aren't easily summarized by a lighter systems mechanics. I dare people to try and convert Sidereals to anything. (I mean Godbound kind of does it with the Undestined, but its missing out on the true nature of the Sidereal charmset as a bunch of weird esoteric tools you need to figure out how to apply properly to get things done)

I still want a lighter system though. the rest of the Exalted are easy to convert in comparison.

I'm only really up on 3e; what kind of weird esoteric stuff do sidereal charmsets do?

[Lord Raziere]

I'm only really up on 3e; what kind of weird esoteric stuff do sidereal charmsets do?

lets see.....
-drag an entire town from one place to another and make the people within remember always being at the new location
-turn an acquaintance or familiar of the Sidereal into a lesser elemental dragon so that she may ride them for one scene, then turns back and is a burnt out husk forevermore
-be on time for any deadline
-sacrifice a bit of their flesh to summon an elemental at a strong manifestation of an element specifically to protect a location and its people for a year and nothing else
-make a water elemental or river god suddenly remember that it has something to do elsewhere and leave. there is no indication that it works on anyone else
-make minor changes to scenery and thus attack using various details of the landscape like dropping boulders from a cliff or directing a wasps nest or whatever else you can come up with
-dodge a combat encounter by suddenly deciding they are somewhere else.
-make people fall out of love from any distance by cursing one of them
-choose two people, and twist their fate to give a beneficiary an emotional bond that gives them power over the victim, the other person
-form a social group out of people who never knew each other before
-use a beginning archery charm to turn words into an arrow and fire it at someone to send a message among many other uses
-use another archery charm to: change the weather, play cupid, fire boulders at people, heal people, make ripe wheat grow from the ground, and other such transformations
-the ability to constantly run in one direction forever as long they keep within ten degrees of their initial heading
-force a character who is weighing their options to make a decision
-lend your oratorical skills to someone else to help or hinder them at your choosing
-make a ruinous circumstance happen to somebody within a conflict, no matter how small or large, so long as the event is possible, the intervention is proportional to the conflict, and is within ten miles
-spit out a green pattern spider from your mouth to answer questions with simple objective facts
-make a small plant grow rapidly into a research assistant for five days but if attacked the assistant immediately reverts to their plant form
-state the truth in such a way that people think they see through your "lie" and believes what you said is not true
-steal someone's name so that only the Sidereal can think, speak or write it.
-designate a victim to give up to the Wyld so that it recedes and gives up miles of Creation
-hire a new god
-various future vision and prediction stuff, probably the easiest ones
-control a spirit using Terminal sanction to things like destroy them, bind them to a task for a year and day, bind them into an object or reform in their sanctum
-painlessly kill a creature that wants to die

things like that. this is not all of them, but I think its a good list of examples of how freaking strange the things Sidereals do compared to other Exalts. and thats not getting into Sidereal martial arts which are even stranger.

[Cluedrew]

Sorta? You can take a whack at it with any high-power system, but Exalted is one of the broadest games I've ever read

"Exalted without the superheavy rules" is a common sentiment, but it's like Grod said - part of the appeal is that it's broader than many fantasy games. As well as giving superpowers to characters who aren't sorcerers, warriors or thieves.

Which is really the thing isn't it? There are various things that have pushed Exalted up the list of systems I want to play. Such as Keychain of Creation. But one of them was the charm charts, for every skill with awesome things on all of them.

But really the less start up work the easier it will be to get people near me to play it. It feels like a hard sell because I had to learn a lot about Exalted before I was really interested. Even in this thread people are talking about the system pushing you towards societal changes, something interesting I have never heard of before.

STaRS would be a pretty good rules-light alternative.

I don't doubt it.

Fate and Powered by the Apocalypse would probably also to all right. Fate/Fudge by the usual toolkit stuff, Powered by the Apocalypse might need a lot of play-books, but they could capture the unique feel of each type pretty well.

[Eurus]

Ahem.

Dahal Meris, Exemplar of Earthly Tedium

(...)

Earth and Bestial Transformations to take on the appearance of a gigantic beetle, wielding a drill and therefore bore through obstacles. Could also be a Behemoth, of course.

Okay, I laughed. That was well done. He's a boring beetle.

[Grod_The_Giant]

awesome stuff

That sort of specificity in weirdness is largely a matter of crunch. You're inevitably going to lose that if you change systems. You're going to lose a whole lot of that; 3e Exalted, at least, is one of the most distinct-feeling systems I've ever played, with its own unique flow and flavor baked in. You can't really keep that without building a system from the ground up.

But if you look at it in terms of the sort of broad categories rules-light games use, Sidereal stuff seems to sort itself into "manipulating fate" and "authority over spirits," with quirky limits based on the specific fluff. And that part could probably be retained in Fate, STaRS, or Apocalypse World, albeit with a certain amount of back-and-forth with the GM.

[lightningcat]

Yeah, and the powers of at least one Exalted have aren't easily summarized by a lighter systems mechanics. I dare people to try and convert Sidereals to anything. (I mean Godbound kind of does it with the Undestined, but its missing out on the true nature of the Sidereal charmset as a bunch of weird esoteric tools you need to figure out how to apply properly to get things done)

I still want a lighter system though. the rest of the Exalted are easy to convert in comparison.

Sidereals do make a mess of lighter rule sets, unless you basically go freeform.
Solars and Abyssals are just people cranked to 12. Dragonbloods are the elemental masters. Lunars are shapeshifters. But Sidereals are the rulebenders, making them work without a heavier ruleset is a challenge. Making them work with the others Exalts is a seperate challenge.

[Lord Raziere]

That sort of specificity in weirdness is largely a matter of crunch. You're inevitably going to lose that if you change systems. You're going to lose a whole lot of that; 3e Exalted, at least, is one of the most distinct-feeling systems I've ever played, with its own unique flow and flavor baked in. You can't really keep that without building a system from the ground up.

But if you look at it in terms of the sort of broad categories rules-light games use, Sidereal stuff seems to sort itself into "manipulating fate" and "authority over spirits," with quirky limits based on the specific fluff. And that part could probably be retained in Fate, STaRS, or Apocalypse World, albeit with a certain amount of back-and-forth with the GM.

well I knew of the manipulating fate part, but for some reason the authority over spirits bit kept eluding me despite it being so obvious. I think its because Sidereals dwell in a city of nothing BUT spirits...

so....hm...I think I can better convert Sidereals to other things if I see their spirit authority as a power to accomplish things. like, sure a Sidereal does this weird tricky thing with their charm behind the scenes but the practical result should be something any system can replicate.

like if I were to what their POWERS are rather than their specific charms that they wield it'd be:
-knowing a LOT, maybe even more than a Lore Supernal Solar
-being really good at martial arts in their own way
-hiding their identities with their astrology- essentially fate weaved disguises
-having godly allies

so lets say for a lighter system that you want a Sidereal to kill someone with lightning, the answer isn't to make a charm to do that, the answer is to make a POWER to do that, but leave the specifics of how the Sidereal does that as background to the actual effect. maybe they fire an arrow that turns into lightning, maybe they are good at weaving fate so that people get struck by lightning, maybe they just bribe gods to fire lightning for them from the sky whenever they offer a prayer and a coin of ambrosia. maybe they're just really good at Air Dragon Style. the important thing is, the Sidereal strikes someone with lightning.

so maybe look at the things Sidereals can do as reasons why they have might this or that power that CAN be replicated rather than try to replicate the powers themselves? I think that will work.

[Morty]

Which is really the thing isn't it? There are various things that have pushed Exalted up the list of systems I want to play. Such as Keychain of Creation. But one of them was the charm charts, for every skill with awesome things on all of them.

But really the less start up work the easier it will be to get people near me to play it. It feels like a hard sell because I had to learn a lot about Exalted before I was really interested. Even in this thread people are talking about the system pushing you towards societal changes, something interesting I have never heard of before.

It's less pushing and more acknowledging that the power of the Exalted will mean they'll shape societies one way or the other, even without meaning to.

[Lord Raziere]

It's less pushing and more acknowledging that the power of the Exalted will mean they'll shape societies one way or the other, even without meaning to.

Yeah, some Castes are just better about shaping it intentionally than others, and the ones that are better are often long term thinking and more about being masterminds, merchants or lawmakers than combatants

[ShadowImmor]

Oh man I loved Exalted, though I've never been able to play in a game. (In my gaming group, I'm the guy that runs all the White Wolf stuff, except Hunter, that's my wife's baby)

I would really love to play in a game of Exalted, like a proper game not one that peters out after a few weeks because the ST isn't really into it.

Does anyone know if there is anywhere to play it online?

[Morty]

I've had luck finding games on this Discord server.