Anatomy of Failed Design: Exalted

[FatR]

OK, Hunter is such a fucking confused mess that it seriously gets its own 1d4chan article. Also whenever it is mentioned it generates a long tirade on rpg.net.

Frank, that rpg.net article you linked has more than half of the people in the thread loving Hunter. What gives?

Well, I wouldn't go as far as Frank and say that only WW sellouts like Hunter. After all, quite a few people bought the book when the line was still in print, in fact the line had more titles than, say, any nWoD line, except Vampire and maybe Mage. But he's right that rpg.net is not the place where harsh criticism of WW (or 4E, for that matter) is tolerated. If you try to express it consistently outside of hate threads, and often in even in hate threads, you'll be set on flames by the usual crowd of trolls and the moderators always will be on their side if you try to respond in kind. In fact, one of the mods is a former (?) WW freelancer, who is not above participating in forum brawls. As a result, giving any sort of negative feedback against major gamelines, when people actually ask for feedback (because this doesn't generally happen in dedicated hate threads) is generally discouraged. In some cases this, of course, is not enough. Exalted fans, for example, long ago started using special "Exalted+" threads, where you aren't supposed to be negative, because of the overwhelming disappointment, whining and hatred.

[TavishArtair]

The Exalted+ tag is even used on threads which are critical of the game system because people don't want to hear anymore of the bitching when they're trying to constructively evaluate how to fix something.

[Lago PARANOIA]

FatR, you sly dog, you almost weaseled out of one part here.

You never discussed the most fucked-up part of the game:

Exalted's fucked up 'magic and elitism is cool, going above your station or combining weak forces is bad' morality.

For a game that's all about giving destiny the finger and fighting for a better future, a disturbingly small number of people actually get the privilege of doing so. Not only that, but it seems that doing so is actually bad. Like the Dragonblood are bad not because they're being dicks but because they usurped the proper rulers and aren't sucking their dicks.

[FatR]

Oh yeah. This certainly deserves its own rant. I'll try to get to it soon.

[mean_liar]

FatR, you sly dog, you almost weaseled out of one part here.

You never discussed the most fucked-up part of the game:

Exalted's fucked up 'magic and elitism is cool, going above your station or combining weak forces is bad' morality.

For a game that's all about giving destiny the finger and fighting for a better future, a disturbingly small number of people actually get the privilege of doing so. Not only that, but it seems that doing so is actually bad. Like the Dragonblood are bad not because they're being dicks but because they usurped the proper rulers and aren't sucking their dicks.

Don't forget the part where only the nihilists aren't beholden to the Great Curse, meaning that there is no "solution" to the Exalted setting that players could reasonably expect to implement since they all shatter eventually.

The Exalted game I really want to play is the one where the PCs find out about the Great Curse and try to rectify it.

[endersdouble]

The Exalted game I really want to play is the one where the PCs find out about the Great Curse and try to rectify it.

And yet I get the feeling from everyone in this thread that WW SWAT teams will come down on you if you try and play that game. Seriously, that game would be awesome, and I'd happily play it, and I think that's a game the developers would have no problems with.

[mean_liar]

I don't think that the WW designers would have a problem with that... to me it's actually the only real (positive, heroic) story in Exalted worth telling, since every other one is a race to control the shitpile and fuck it up in your own particular way for a while before it cracks again.

The problem is that the setting and system should probably have more worthwhile super-heroic, restoring the XXX to their glory stories to tell other than just that one.

A Solar campaign ostensibly revolves around saving Creation, but to what end? A Lunar campaign involves the Thousand Streams, which is pointless since the world ends a week from tomorrow. A Sidereal campaign is interesting, but you're playing into the other campaigns by doing so rather than your own and in addition, you're insignificant forever. The Abyssal and Infernal campaigns are either Nihilistic or Evil and neither is particularly satisfying for heroics.

[Orion]

You can seriously just assume the the world *isn't* ending though and use large chunks of setting material as-is. That's the point of the wanking off to "Travel is difficult! Creation is big!" -- that you can choose an area of Creation with 0-1 world-destroying threats and pretend the rest doesn't exist. That's kind of screwed by the fact that that whirlwind rider spell is seriously Terrestrial Circle and flies a frickin' ARMY 100 miles per hour, unfortunately. I think you're supposed to hit your players with random encounters with big elementals or something if they use it to go where you don't want them to.

However, if you and your players make a gentlemen's agreement to stay in, say, the Eastern Kingdoms, you can just NOT USE the Silver Prince, the Alchemicals, the Infernals, or the Scarlet Empress.

[endersdouble]

You can seriously just assume the the world *isn't* ending though and use large chunks of setting material as-is. That's the point of the wanking off to "Travel is difficult! Creation is big!" -- that you can choose an area of Creation with 0-1 world-destroying threats and pretend the rest doesn't exist. That's kind of screwed by the fact that that whirlwind rider spell is seriously Terrestrial Circle and flies a frickin' ARMY 100 miles per hour, unfortunately. I think you're supposed to hit your players with random encounters with big elementals or something if they use it to go where you don't want them to.

However, if you and your players make a gentlemen's agreement to stay in, say, the Eastern Kingdoms, you can just NOT USE the Silver Prince, the Alchemicals, the Infernals, or the Scarlet Empress.

I think that's a very good point, and totally agree in that's how Exalted's death threats are supposed to be; pick one, if that, you like, and assume others are Far Away. The last Exalted campaign I played in was in a tiny region that essentially hadn't even /heard/ of the metaplot (though the Big Bad was Chejop Kejak; thankfully, ST-fiat meant the Dragonblooded players didn't ever have to fight him head on. Arbitrary, but it worked.)

Thing is, the travel spells /must/ exist if you want to have games that /do/ consider multiple regions exist. And they can't be any higher than Celestial sorcery, because if only Solars can play Creation-spanning, that kinda sucks. I'm not even sure if the Terrestial version shouldn't exist, because I hate saying "you must be this tall to enter."

[Orion]

Analysis of Failed Design:Attributes

Exalted uses the Infamous "storyteller" system, meaning that Exalts are burdened with 9 stats, called "Attributes*". This feel a little bit clunky to me. Character should be defined by their spells and charms, it seems to me, not by small gradients in physical stats. If your character is "fast," give him Seven Shadows Evasion and Lightning Foot Style. If he's "tough" give him Adamant Skin Technique and Wound-Closing Meditation.

But despite that gripe, all dicepool games seem to have something like D&D stats, even aWoD, so I could live with it, except: some of these stats are terrible ideas.

Strength, Stamina: Strength only adds to attack damage, Stamina to soak. Dexterity adds to accuracy and to dodge. And for Celestial-level combatants, you can't soak anything you care about, nor can your opponents soak your giant swords, so having STR or STA higher than the minimum for your equipment is pretty much useless.

Appearance: This is blatantly broken: It gives you the equivalent of +2 to charisma and manipulation to all face-to-face interaction. This means people who want to roleplay an ugly character will be easily browbeaten into things. I'm all for low stats hurting you, but that's kind of unfortunate. Plus it adds another computational step to social rolls.

Then there's the question of whether Appearance makes sense as a stat. 'No dump stats" means low-APP characters need to have a big drawback, which hinders the playability of some concepts. In this case, it's being easily talked into things. I personally don't MIND having Appearance, Exalted seems like a game that can and should care what you look like, but extraordinary beauty could just as easily be represented by a charm tree.

Charisma, Manipulation: The only difference between these stats is that one works when you're "deceiving" and the other doesn't. This apparent leads to high-MAN characters being pathological liars who slip falsehoods into their war council in order to mroe effectively fire up the troops.

----

The Fix
Ability Consolidation

Strength and Stamina, folded together, are a good counterpart to Dexterity. Charisma and Manipulation should be folded together because they do the same thing. This suggests a logical number of stats would be 6.

Physical Stats
--Strength: Adds to soak, damage, enables weapon/armor use
--Dexterity: adds to accuracy, dodge, movement
Mental Stats**
--Intelligence
--Wits (now with Extra Perception!)
Social Stats
--Charisma (Now with extra Manipulation!)
--Appearance*** (now with some of charisma's old functions)

The Lunars
Numerology for the whole family!

There's one valid reason to keep the 9 attributes around: to preserve the "3 X 3" 3-symbolism that lunars get for their caste/charm setup. But 6 is also divisible by 3. So our new Caste setup looks like:

Full Moon: Strength, Dexterity
Changing Moon: Charisma, Appearance
No Moon: Intelligence, Wits

OR, if we wanted to mix things up a little bit:

Full Moon: Strength, Wits
No Moon: Intelligence, Charisma
Changing Moon: Dexterity, Appearance

Finally, we could bring back the dead lunar castes and go down to FIVE stats:

Full moon: Strength
Waxing Moon: Charisma
Half Moon: Appearance
Waning Moon: Dexterity
No Moon: Intelligence

*Not to be confused with Abilities. Stupid, Stupid nomenclature...
** Or: Logic, Intuition
***We could also ditch Appearance as a stat and bring in Willpower, if we don't want to use "Willpower" for Edge any more. [/b]

[Kaelik]

One thing... I think you have Appearance wrong, or you are thinking 1e?

2e your social defenses are just modified by whatever your highest of the three is, so the other two are dumbs.

[Orion]

Analysis of Failed Design: Abilities
Then I'll use my SUPERBUREACRACY to--/ Or, you know, I could just summon a horde of angels.

So Exalted has 25 skills, and they're important. If you're not a lunar, they are what determines access to your charms. You have some "favored" skills that make it easier to level up charms in them. Unfortunately, the skills aren't even vaguely balanced again each other. They do totally different things.

Power Skills
Let me show you my REAL power! Shards of Infinity!
Some skills function primarily to open up entire new subsystems for your character to play with.

Martial Arts is useless unless you're going to be advancing through the layers of initiation and collecting training from various masters. By itself it's just a bad Melee.

Occult has legitimately cool native charms, but it's also the pre-req for sorcery, another path that can easily suck up your entire character.

Craft arguably counts; it doesn't actually use a different charm progression, but it leads to dumpster diving through item books, so it still gives abilities extrinsic to your actual Exalt type.

Number Skills
You've got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues
Melee, Integrity, Dodge, Stealth, Socialize, and Awareness all add directly to your combat dicepools. No character can really afford to totally ignore these skills, and you'll want to put as many points into them as possible once you've qualified for the powers you want.

Linguistics is also a number skill if you write letters, and War and Ride are in mounted mass combat.

So far, so good, then we get to

Redundant Skills
This is why Dawn Castes Suck

Archery and Thrown are separate skills, even though they both facilitate ranged weapon attacks. Sure, you want people to have signature styles, but you could just have made separate charm trees off of a "ranged" skill. Counting this twice toward the Dawn's 5 skills is pretty cruel.
many players will invest exclusively in a ranged weapon and Dodge, thereby rendering Melee and Martial Arts unnecessary. Oh, and getting more than one of THOSE skills is useless for every except Solars, Abyssals, and Siderals, since they adds to the same dicepools and nobody else has "melee" charms.

So of the 4 weapon skills assigned to Dawns, you're seriously only ever buying 1-2 of them. If you want War, that's at most 3 Dawn Caste skills you want, meaning that you're *almsot certainly* better off just taking some other friggin caste and buying War, Melee, and Archery as Favored Abilities.

Presence and Performance have similar issues as both are used to parry social attacks, or to make them.

Utility Skills

Some skills don't unlock whole subsystems, or add to combat numbers. They just get rolled occasionally to "do stuff." Honestly most of these skills are pretty lame and forgettable except as pre-reqs to your caste's native charms.

Bureaucracy is a social skill that doesn't make social attacks or defenses. It helps you interact with bureaucracies in some nebulous way--but you COULD just put the Presence-whammy on one official after another. It also supposedly helps you buy and sell things and make a profit, but given the totally abstract wealth system it's totally unclear that selling things for 20% extra gets you anything at all. This skill only exists at all because Solars have some really powerful Bureaucracy charms.

Survival has some applications but doesn't need to be terribly high. It mostly exists to theme some characters as "animal" based to give them druid powers. The wilderness-resistant ones are kinda neat too, I guess.

---

So, one fix to the fact that some skills are kinda useless would be to condense down to 15 skills. This would look something like:

Dawn
--Martial Arts
--Tactics
--Weaponry (includes archery, thrown, melee)
Zenith
--Purity
--Toughness
--Presentation
Twilight
--Occult
--Technical
--
Day
--Athletics (includes dodge)
--Larceny (includes stealth)
--Awareness
Eclipse
--Socialize (includes Bureaucracy)
--Ride (includes animal powers from Survival)

The biggest downside to this approach is that some in-game lore is tied to the 25 skills -- although the only one that I care about is the Sidereal Colleges.

[FatR]

However, if you and your players make a gentlemen's agreement to stay in, say, the Eastern Kingdoms, you can just NOT USE the Silver Prince, the Alchemicals, the Infernals, or the Scarlet Empress.

Picking fragments of the setting that are immediately relevant to your campaign and pretending that the rest basically does not exist or is frozen in time, it the only way to run Exalted. Unfortunately, books do not make this clear enough and a number of mechanics (easily available travel things, and world-killing shit, of course) must be quietly ignored. They shouldn't have pretended that Exalted is a semi-coherent, interconnected setting, as opposed to a bunch of fragments thrown into kitchen sink

[Orion]

Analysis of Failed Design: Combos
You'll never beat my Hopping Crane Technique*

So you have all these charms that let you do awesome stuff. But wait! Not all at the same time!

Goal: Diversity of attacks

See, you want people to *choose* between making a Fire and Stones Strike and a Peony Blossom Attack. That... honestly seems like a reasonable goal in life.

The Downside: Most attacks are useless. You seriously see people running around with charms like Dragon-Graced Weapon (which adds a couple damage dice or some poison) and Ringing Anvil Onslaught (attack ~4 times). Flaming up your sword is *never* worth your charm for the round, or even a slot in a combo, which makes me sad because flaming swords are awesome. All this is especially stupid because of the perfect defenses problem. Everything that adds extra attacks is awesome and made of win. Everything that does some cute status effect on hit is only useful once your opponents' are actually vulnerable, and thus not worth wasting combo space on.

The Fix: A lot of attack-boosting charms are just flavor and should be allowed to apply to everything. Dragon-Graced Weapon, One Strike Two Blows (not as good as it sounds), Ox-Stunning Blow: these and others can seriously just tag along free. But you *do* need some regulation of the big attacks, and this is where I'm lost. Ideally you'd be able to have people choose between Power Attack, Soul Drain, and Flurry without having any of them clearly superior, but even assuming we revise the perfect defense paradigm, games don't have a good track record of balancing multiple swings. And I *do* kind of like the idea of putting together interesting combos of effects, even if every such combo is actually just Flurry+Effect

Currently I'm leaning towards dividing attack moves into "strike" (Examples: counter-attack, flurry, energy bolt), "target" (power attack, stunning fist, trip), and "channel" (fire sword, energy drain, curse), making you choose one of each when you attack.

Goal: Balance offense and defense. They had this idea that making you choose between attacking and defending would create interesting tactical decisions. And this *kind of * works when low-essence Solars fight squads of mooks, or weak supernaturals like blood apes and beastmen. You can conceivably have enough Dodge or Parry to weather a few of their attacks (at least with Melee Excellency running) and so you can risk using Fire and Stones to crush a heavily armored beastman or Peony Blossom to shred everything in sight.

The Problem: What happens when you fight another exalt who has the same dilemma? Turtle fight. You know that one Peony Blossom or even Ringing Anvil is enough to make you explode, so you NEVER attack with anything that makes you lose access to Heavenly Guardian Defense. This turns everything into an interminable cripple-fight unless, as always happens, everyone combos Heavenly Guardian with whatever attacks they happen to want to use.

The Fix: TBD

Issue: Power-Ups
Scene-length buff powers exist. They're extraordinarily powerful. Besides the fact that giving every powerful fighter multiple standard-action self-buffs makes ambushes unforgivable, this interacts weirdly with combos.

The Problem: Maybe you want to activate a powerup without having your head exploded. Now you need to combo it with Heavenly Guardian Defense. This is actually obvious and cheap enough to do that it's not gamebreaking, but it's a needlessly confusing XP tax.

The Fix: Let people use their defenses for free with their power-ups, OR lets them power-up once per round as a swift action while attacking.

Goal: Signature Moves
Evidently a combo was supposed to a character's signature move, with flashy special effects. This would be an awesome way to distinguish interesting NPCs.

Problem: Most of the NPC writeups don't even have combos. Which means they ignore the customization of the system, but also that they fail combat forever. There are Elder,s who have combos statted which will kill you, and other exalts who... mostly don't, in the stuff I've read.

Fix: Either give the frikkin NPCs combos, or, better, use an action type system such that you can tell by someone's charmlist how he can fight.



*Editor's Note: I really do know the Hopping Crane technique

[Draco_Argentum]

The problem I have with every WW game is that defense is just done poorly. The multi opponents tax is way too high and the fact that you're meant to choose offense or defense is ass. I'd suggest splitting the actions. You pick an offense action and a defense action that lasts until your next go.

[Silent Wayfarer]

One thing... I think you have Appearance wrong, or you are thinking 1e?

2e your social defenses are just modified by whatever your highest of the three is, so the other two are dumbs.

Sort of. Your Mental Parry DV is generally your highest social stat + highest social skill. Your Mental Dodge DV is your Willpower + Integrity + Essence. Appearance adds ANOTHER layer to this.

Having a higher Appearance than the other guy decreases his MDVs by 1 per point you exceed him by. Similarly, if he is prettier than you, YOU get the penalty to MDVs. In general, 1 point of MDV = 1 success = 2 dice.

[Orion]

Analysis of Failed Design: Bonus Points
This is so stupid I have no words

So Exalted, like Shadowrun, uses different resources for chargen and adventuring advancement; some thing are like 3 times more efficient one way than another. They actually ameliorate this somewhat by making shit interrelated: buying Essence is one of the least efficient ways you could spend your Bonus Points, except that if you do you can get Essence 3 charms as part of your free 10. There may not even be 10 essence 2 chars you're dying to have so this is a pretty okay deal.

Still though, the resulting accounting is fucked

Analysis of Failed Design: Favored Traits

This is fucked because they make it more expensive to develop non-favored traits, but not to start with them. I guess this is just a special case of the above problem, but it's especially perverse because it encourages you to start off with the lowest possible amount in your favored skills, and invest heavily in everything else. In my mind, this tends to lead to building a character first and retroactively Favoring the stuff I wanted but didn't get round to.

Not only is this mechanically unbalanced, the fluff is off. That would make perfect sense, if, say, a Dawn Solar was supposed to be someone infused with ancient fighting knowledge against his will. He might start off as a diplomat or scientist, but get more and more martial arts beamed into his head until that became his primary schtick. That would be cool and an interesting roleplaying opportunity if that's how solar exaltation worked, but it's not. A Dawn Solar is exalted because he's already the greatest of mortal warriors.

Finally, you do want to make it easier to get stuff in your own "schtick", but not by giving more diverse characters fewer total build points.

Solution: Use an aWoD-style advancement deck. Include cards like "Learn a charm based on a favored skill" or "+1 to a favored skill."

Analaysis of Failed Design: Training Effects

These let you borrow XP from the future. This is bad.

Fix: Tiger Warrior Training-- You may sacrifice any Minor Arcana to add one to your Martial Arts, Tactics, or Weaponry. Any Followers you possess have at least 4 in those skills.

[Josh_Kablack]

Solution: Use an aWoD-style advancement deck

Glad to see someone is finally using my suggestions on Exalted.

[DeadlyReed]

If you can find it, the Making of Exalted artbook has a number of insights into the thought processes behind the game.

[DeadlyReed]

You might also want to check out the Writer Quotes archived at the Unofficial Exalted Wiki here and additional quotes (mostly by 2E writers) here.

[A Man In Black]

You might also want to check out the Writer Quotes archived at the Unofficial Exalted Wiki here and additional quotes (mostly by 2E writers) here.

First one I read:

And to answer the ever-grumpy Jay, even if I thought there was something I had done wrong with Lunars, reversing myself would be the very worst decision I could make. It would alienate the not-inconsiderable number of people who are quite happy with Lunars as it stands, it would generate a lot of serious inconsistencies in the game world and in no way guarantee the approval of people who currently don't like it. I don't see how this would be a good design decision. I'm sorry you don't appreciate the Lunar viewpoint. I suspect you'll like Sidereals, and am not too sure about Abyssals.

>:|

"If the lightbulb burns out, the worst thing I could do is to replace it, because a certain number of players like sitting in the dark."

[Lago PARANOIA]

A true warrior never fears the challenge of battle but always remember you cannot change your destiny.

A wise underpaid salaryman programmer once said that. An extremely awesome dude sometimes has that floating around in his signature.

Regardless, FatR, as much as I know it pains you you must review the biggest and most important element of the fail of Exalted one final; we've kind of kicked the can around a bit on other threads but we need it here.

[Josh_Kablack]

If you can find it, the Making of Exalted artbook has a number of insights into the thought processes behind the game.

If they don't include "Dude, I don't believe I freakin' scored weed in the middle of a graveyard at 3 am!!" then they are woefully incomplete.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Bumping this thread again. You cannot escape your destiny, FatR.

[FatR]

Okay, okay. I wanted to forget my suffering and let go of hatred, but looks like I need to do one more thing before I will be able do so, after all.