The Gaming Den

So, as most people here probably already know, White Wolf is currently designing a new edition of the shit pile Exalted and asking people for money through Kickstarter. It's basically a foregone conclusion that their new edition will be just as shitty as the last two- especially after the hilarious Rape Ghost preview- but that's not what interests me.

What does interest me is the question "What could the 3rd edition theoretically do to make Exalted a good game?"

Would the designers need to scrap the d10 rolling system entirely and switch to class levels? Do Charms as a concept need to be entirely removed in favor of static superhero abilities like the Champions system? What, in your opinion, needs to change to make Exalted a good game?

Aside from fixing the setting, obviously.

For Exalted 3rd Edition not to suck mechanically, it would need:

[*] A completely redesigned RNG. I like dicepools and all, but they're not for people who prefer to eyeball mechanics. Seriously, Exalted should switch to TN3 d6s or a modest bellcurve like with 3d6.
[*] Completely redesigned charm system. It's way too easy for people to take charms that leave them completely level inappropriate or leave holes in their defenses. Exalted practically screams for a class and level setup, but I bet that WW is too snobby to use such a system.
[*] Completely redesigned melee positioning system. If they don't want to do discrete squares/hexes -- which is totally understandable -- then they should switch to zones. As is, Exalted Combat feels exactly like playing a 16-bit Final Fantasy game.
[*] Completely redesigned bestiary. As is, a full coterie of competently build Celestials have pretty much nothing to challenge them except for Dragonblooded gangbangs, nerfed Deathlords, or Psycho Ranger matchups. That's pretty fucking pathetic.
[*] Completely redesigned party dynamics. Right now, the setup of Solar > Abyssal, Infernal > Sidereal > Lunar > Dragonblooded, Alchemical > Mortal is completely unworkable. People want to be different exalts working in the same party and shitting in their cheerios is just unacceptable.
[*] Across-the-board nerf to power level. There's no reason why shit can't get bananas, but the authors seem completely incapable of handling anything past Dynasty Warriors level. There's no shame in that; it's harder to design adventures for Goku than King Arthur. But writing high-level adventures and scenarios is by far the hardest part of setting design and if they're not up to it then they shouldn't even try.

So, yeah. Pretty much the best thing that they could do is 'throw out all of the crunch and make the game a clone of D&D, Champions, or a Shadowrun 4E<->Earthdawn fusion'. They could also base the game on FATE Core and publish a bunch of Extras. Hell, unless the Exalted Authors are willing to do all of that crunch I would be delighted if they made it an alternate FATE module like Spirit of the Century.

And those are the mechanical problems of Exalted. As we can see from the Something Awful scandal, the setting itself is badly in need of a fix and update.

FatR's rant covers the numerous setting-based problems of Exalted better than I ever could. So here it is.

Hey, FrankTrollman and AncientHistory: if you're reading this, you guys totally need to do a review of 1E Exalted: The Lunars. And maybe 2E Exalted: Dreams of the First Age or 1E Exalted: The Dragon-blooded. But definitely Exalted: The Lunars. Shit is fucked to the max.

Hell, I will pay for a PDF for you guys to download.

I have never opened an Exalted book. That said, I've seen games and webcomics loosely based on Exalted, and most of them seemed much better than what I know about the source material.

For Exalted 3E to be good enough for me to pick it up, I'd want a combat system that let you run fights that felt like Dynasty Warriors with a minimum of hassle, a magic system that let you do cool stuff out of combat and create interesting things, and functional strategic-scale empire and stronghold rules.

And no rape ghosts would be nice, too. If it was easier to port the rules to a new setting than with Feng Shui, that would be cool.

I think the one big thing would be "be made by someone else". It can't be White Wolf, it can't be fans of White Wolf. Hell, it will basically be awful as long as it's made by people that like Exalted as it is, even if they admit "there are some problems".

The way for it to be good would be for the designers to say "We like the magical world full of kung fu fighting, we like the tits-out combat and fancy silk robes and multi-tiered pagodas and flying ships, we like that people can shout a silly power name every time they do anything, we like the idea of stunts. We like the idea of heroes being empowered by different sources that appropriately flavours what they do. Now we're making a new game based on those points, it will happen to be called Exalted."

Koumei wrote:It can't be White Wolf, it can't be fans of White Wolf. Hell, it will basically be awful as long as it's made by people that like Exalted as it is, even if they admit "there are some problems".

Well, on one hand I'm kind of sympathetic towards the Exalted 3E team because the fanbase is so picky.

On the other hand, Exalted is so flawed right now that Exalted 3E not being an improvement over the previous versions would require a deliberate amount of fucking up. For serious, I don't even think Mike Mearls could fuck up the Exalted setting even worse. I don't think Gary Gygax could fuck it up even worse. I don't think that Bruce Cordell could fuck it up even worse.

There are a lot of paths to make Exalted better.

[*] Go the D&D route. Exalted is a classplosioned class and level system with no multiclassing. Full-Moon Lunar, Eclipse Solar, etc. are all separate classes. And within the separate classes, you have broad on-the-rails options like Flamewand Fire Dragonblooded or Craftmaster Alchemical. The skill system is a straight up hack of 3E D&D or even 4E D&D.
[*] Go the Champions Mutants and Masterminds Route, but with more power segregation. Certain powers are limited by maximum rank to certain splats. You seriously have six different Melee schools, all with prepackaged extras.
[*] Go the FATE Core route. Everything is heavily abstracted and players are expected to take narrative control frequently and the difference in broad combat utility between a Charcoal March of Spider Butthumper and a Silver Claw T-Rex Heroin Pisser is largely cosmetic. Exalted differs from vanilla FATE Core though in that it has an entirely different skill list, a ton more prepackaged stunts and extras, and you get a grip of free stunts just by increasing your base skill mods.

Seriously, there are a ton of ways Exalted can suck less than it currently does while still maintaining the broad flavor. But if White Wolf has taught us anything it's that they're so incompetent that they can make WotC look like Pixar.

I don't think there is anything wrong with having a game system for fantasy combat that is essentially or explicitly 16-bit menu-based JRPG combat. Select something awesome sounding, do something fucking crazy, have big numbers show up over the target, don't fucking worry about whether your attack was "melee" or "ranged" because you just jump back to where you started regardless. Having a game that you could explicitly play with no miniatures or battle map at all because positioning didn't fucking matter would be a selling point. And the basic absurdity or swords and bows being exactly the same would matter less if you were doing over the top crazy shit with camel toes and guns that shot wolves.

I also don't think there's anything wrong with a game being Dynasty Warriors, and having the players run through Sino-Indic battlefields wracking up huge kill totals. But that seems kind of like a different game, one which comes with a hundred plastic tiny men not unlike the Zombies boardgame. Although of course, you'd want them to look like the plastic tiny men from Shogun for theme.

Obviously these aren't the same direction. One involves abstracting out the enemy army entirely, while the other involves setting up and knocking down hundreds or thousands of soldiers each night. Both could be a way to make something that was "themed like Exalted" be kind of cool.

But basically Koumei got it in one: it can't be made by fans of White Wolf. Which is basically what is happening for 3rd edition now. White Wolf of course doesn't really exist, and the IP has been licensed to a group of ex-White Wolf employees and fans who are operating without corporate control being funded directly by the hardest core fans through kickstarter. Whatever direction you think Exalted should go, that's the wrong one. What you don't want is people who think White Wolf was basically going in a good direction when it fucking went out of business deciding to write fanfiction into canon without any voices of reason telling them they can't have rape magic before things get published. Because those people obviously have terrible ideas, because the company they thought was basically doing fine went out of business by not doing fine.

-Username17

Meanwhile, what we're getting seems to be pretty much this:

a game system for fantasy combat that is essentially or explicitly 16-bit menu-based JRPG combat. Select something awesome sounding, do something fucking crazy, have big numbers show up over the target, don't fucking worry about whether your attack was "melee" or "ranged" because you just jump back to where you started regardless. Having a game that you could explicitly play with no miniatures or battle map at all because positioning didn't fucking matter would be a selling point.

but with lots of inherited Storyteller-isms. (Attribute+Ability, TN 7 Nd10 dice pools etc.) They're really committed to that system for some reason, which is a shame, because while dice pools aren't a bad choice, the Storyteller system is a pretty rotten implementation of such. It has so many utterly obvious flaws that it can trivially be improved on by basically any Joe with a rudimentary understanding of math and point buy systems.

Lea Sheppard and Holden seem to understand how to improve the game, but for all their talk about fixing Exalted from the ground up and having carte blanche to make the system the way they thing it should be, I'm 90% sure they won't go far enough.

Fix your tags, Schleiermacher.

And yeah, the biggest stumbling block to Exalted 3e is that it's being made by WW and fans, for WW and fans. That means carting along a lot of sacred cows, most of them profane.

In other news, there are a couple of Wuxia FATE Core hacks being worked on. Tianxia and Jadepunk come immediately to mind.

Avoraciopoctules wrote:I have never opened an Exalted book. That said, I've seen games and webcomics loosely based on Exalted, and most of them seemed much better than what I know about the source material.

That's hardly surprising given that Exalted has one of the biggest gaps I've seen between what most seem to people hope it will be about and what the setting materials actually support. They grim-derped things in such a way that even just going the lazy fanfic route and inserting various flavors of Mary Sue/Chosen One cliches upon the "PCs" has a fair chance of feeling less egregiously terrible than playing that shit as written. Given the faux manga trappings they lazily co-opted it wouldn't even be off-genre if you did a light adventure in which Alchemical protagonists were allowed to punch way above their ostensible weight class thanks to the power of the cards/love/friendship/determination/no-goddamn-reason-whatsoever.

Man, I was expecting an epic picture or something, not fucked tags, when i saw the layout all wonky.

EX3 is not going to change the sexual fuckedupness of 2E. Their preview of the Abyssal Socialize tree can be summarized up as "ghost molestation" and "reducing victims to nymphomaniacs".