Heaven's Thunder Hammer wrote:
I'd happily listen to whatever you have to say about 3E. It's hard to get genuine feedback about how it plays now.
I won't pretend that I've played it, but upon reading I see that they have still not attempted to fix the following fundamental problems in their approach to system building and gameplay:
- The contradiction between the unlimited power fantasy theme, where specific fantastic abilities you can place on your charsheet mostly serve to give you specific ideas on how you will effortlessly own the world, and extremely fiddly, complex mechanics that seem to require understanding of their synergies to not get shit beaten out of you even by weak-ass muppets from the Antagonists chapter.
- Expanding on that, the book is insanely fucking wordy, running to nearly 600 pages. Most of those are Charms and other crunch. Even though every sane person by late 2E was saying that they need to tone the crunch bloat the fuck down. And even though long Charm trees resulting from that crunch bloat sort of fundamentally contradict the core idea of PCs being movers and shakers of the setting from the word "go", because PCs are not going to have even one tree, much less several, maxed at the start, and the difference between a dabbler and an expert with several combat-related Charm trees fully collected is obviously huge.
- Starting system design with the strongest splat and then working down, instead of choosing the easier way of starting with the weakest and working up.
- Still having stronger and weaker splats, for that matter. I've taken a peek at Exalted subreddit recently, and to my lack of surprise, one of the threads on the first page was about balancing a party of different Exalts and how this still is not really possible. Lack of surprise was due to the fact that whenever I had run or played an Exalted game with more than one person besides the GM, people wanted to play different splats. There is absolutely NO justification for not having playable Exalted be mechanically balanced, given that I've managed to think of about 3 ways to make them so and stiikk keep all the current premises and core history of the setting while taking a shower.
That's just the unforgivable sins they committed while staying fully within the existing paradigm. Which may be considered shitty in itself.