Anatomy of Failed Design: Exalted

[DeadlyReed]

It's not entirely true that there are no decent sentient beings in the Exalted-verse. The problem is... there's only 3 (Demetheus, Fallen Wolf of the Cutting Sea, and Stern Whip of Industry).

[mean_liar]

FatR, is there any way you can expand that into a bullet point/essay?

You know it gives me a woody when people do that. And you're so good at it, too.

You are a strange person.

[Lago PARANOIA]

FatR, Lago still standing by.

[TheWorid]

Red 3, standing by.

[FatR]

FatR, is there any way you can expand that into a bullet point/essay?

You know it gives me a woody when people do that. And you're so good at it, too.

You are a strange person.

Yeah.

And I'm not feeling angry enough to rant more right now. Maybe when I need to went again.

Also, when I said about the system that doesn't have a single decent sentient being in it, I meant 4E. For Exalted I can probably name half a dozen. Well, for 4E that's an exaggeration too, but still there's a distinctive vibe that all significant NPCs must be PC-antagonizing assholes, probably because the authors believe that any NPC you have no reason to fight is a waste of space.

[Maxus]

Lago, give Zero Punctuation another shot.

It's got enough creatively-applied vitriol and clear-sighted "THIS is where it went wrong" to keep you from starving.

[schpeelah]

Also Angry Video Game Nerd (mostly lots of cussing, admittedly), Nostalgia Critic, The Spoony One (Final Fantasy), Atop The 4th Wall and the tvtropes article for Accentuate The Negative should provide you with even more. I'm sure I'm forgetting something.

[Mask_De_H]

Dude, I think you're addicted. You need help.

Add Dethroning Moment of Suck, It Just Bugs Me, and It's Popular Now It Sucks on the TVTropes list. Seconding Spoony.

[FatR]

Dethroning Moment of Suck page is only funny until they get to your favorite series.

[Smeelbo]

I've never played, or wanted to play Exalted, but when I saw it, I thought if it were a game where one could play out Epic Hindu Mythology, things like Ramayana, Mahabharata and so on, then I'd look into it. As it is, everything I've heard about the whole Solar mythology literally makes me want to vomit.

Smeelbo

[Lago PARANOIA]

Dethroning Moment of Suck page is only funny until they get to your favorite series.

Angry Video Game Nerd is my second-favorite reviewer on the Interwebs and I'm the one who wrote the entry for his DMoS.

Part of being a fan is knowing when your favorite series has done wrong, acknowledging it, mocking it if need be, then moving on with your life.

I actually feel sorry for fans who need to constantly justify and rationalize the shitty moments of their favorite series. You shouldn't have to do that. All you need to say is that the good outweighs the bad rather than getting all weepy and defensive if someone points out that your series has moments of shit in it or is even mostly shit. I can't even imagine the amount of apologetics and self-deception needed for, say, Bleach / 3E D&D / Kingdom Hearts / ST: Voyager etc. fans who embrace this tragic belief.

To me, DMoS is funny because I like those series.

[Kaelik]

Yeah, I actually liked Bleach in all it's cheesy glory right up until the end of the Aaizen arc. And then, it went and fucked itself over by throwing bullshit plots for the next four hundred billion episodes.

[Mask_De_H]

Yeah, I actually liked Bleach in all it's cheesy glory right up until the end of the Aaizen arc. And then, it went and fucked itself over by throwing bullshit plots for the next four hundred billion episodes.

All of the shitty filler was just Aizen trolling everybody. We've all seen Kyoka Suigetsu, and that's why Bleach is so bad. [/WMG]

[Lago PARANOIA]

Can anyone point me towards 1E Lunar haet threads? Or at least give me the 411 on First Age Solars?

[TavishArtair]

First Age Solars basically looked exactly like a more high tech version of the "before the world went to (more) shit" era of Girl Genius, plus more Roman Senate (staffed entirely by Sparks of course). So people were totally being turned into experiments left and right, and every Solar made a bunch of gear and probably her own personal army of robot staffers, and people still ostensibly had jobs of some sort but mostly they were to maintain the thaumaturgic machinery that basically tamed the entire world to make it into the Promised Land of milk and honey against a backdrop of Rock Candy Mountain. Occasionally a Solar would totally secede from the Senate Deliberative more or less, and take a small country with them, but this was viewed as an acceptable move (and no one really wanted to start a giant Solar on Solar war just yet) if you didn't then promptly hang up a sign reading "GANONDORF'S TOWER" and throw around Giant Poes to add some more "atmosphere" to the area.

The Terrestrial Exalted supported the Solar reign, and the Lunars were basically not given equal time due to being viewed as dependents of the Solars (which they weren't really), and the Sidereals for a long while had their hands full. It was a pretty awesome place to live in if you ignore the horrors of half-mad Exalted, but it was mostly created and maintained by the fact that Solars all could learn and use the "Ruling a Golden Utopia Style" Charm and its followups. When all the Celestials withdrew from society, there were no Terrestrials capable of maintaining the infrastructure the Solars had made, as they literally weren't competent enough, and the Gods weren't helping (often themselves being betrayed), which is why the modern Exalted world looks kind of like Final Fantasy with imperishable pieces of giant magitech machinery standing next to a now-pastoral countryside kinda... sitting there with nothing to do.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

words words great summary of first age solars words words

Great summary.

[FatR]

Can anyone point me towards 1E Lunar haet threads? Or at least give me the 411 on First Age Solars?

No, I don't have any links saved, unfortunately.

As about FA Solars description above, I'll say that it's generally true. I even agree, that as precursors they were a decent idea.

Whether the actual First Age setting was plausible or faciliated actual games are entirely separate questions. I thought that while it was a good place to live, during the heyday (until Solars started going batshit), it is not a good place to put games in. You cannot ever do anything significant, because NPC cockblockers won't let you to interfere in major ways. Even if GM let's you generate a Solar elder and somehow makes high-Essence mechanics fun, while you manage to put together dozens upon dozens of fiddly bits, the setting is unhelpful as far as campaign seeds and adventure ideas for uber-powerful characters are concerned. Authors themselves quickly started pretending that their First Age supplement was about running low-level games within the system, like Dragon-Blooded Section 9 and shit. Except, the setting does not provide you much useful framework for such games too (I, for example, would've really appreciated details about investigation and police procedure in the world where police is loaded on divinatory Charms, because it's something I cannot easily come up with myself, but nope, there's nothing like that).

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Authors themselves quickly started pretending that their First Age supplement was about running low-level games within the system, like Dragon-Blooded Section 9 and shit. Except, the setting does not provide you much useful framework for such games too (I, for example, would've really appreciated details about investigation and police procedure in the world where police is loaded on divinatory Charms, because it's something I cannot easily come up with myself, but nope, there's nothing like that).

Hmm. You know, I was aware of the Terrestrial Section 9 game concept, but you're right - there's not a lot of actual support for how to make that happen in the setting. I never really noticed that before, but yeah, that kind of sucks.

[TavishArtair]

Exalted needed more "campaign concept" books like Outcaste (1e). It's quite probable that the specifics of the things inside it were not very workable, but it worked out such that it provided multiple interesting stories you could run, new character archetypes you could play without introducing a serious variation on an Exalted type, and cool toys for anyone who just happened to involve a game that loosely connected with those things.

[FatR]

Okay, White Wolf whores rpg.net moderators managed to inflict enough butthurt on me for making the long-promised rant after all.

So...

7. Grimdarkness starts and wins.

Exalted apologists really like invoking "PCs are the sole light that's supposed to illuminate the grimdark world" excuse whenever asked why the Creation is such overwhelmingly godawful place, dominated by bastard-filled rat bastards with bastard coating, with horrific suffering of intelligent beings on grand scale pretty much inherent in the system*. Why this is a load of bullshit? Well, besides "above-mentioned bastards are hell of a lot more powerful than PCs probably will ever be" issue, I covered before?

1)One cannot conquer alone. Seriously how many heroes, in any media, you, Denners, can name, who actually fought and prevailed against the whole world, hostile to them, and, more importantly, their ideals? Even shonen protagonists, for whom challenging hopeless odds, when nothing in-universe indicates even a remote possibility of their victory, is practically a job requirement, never happen to be in such situations. They always have mentors, allies, and friends, who serve to affirm their purpose and show that they have something to fight for, even if not to lend a hand directly in battling ridiculously overpowered BBEGs. Heroes being totally alone in the dark is the mark of antiutopias, horror and other genres where they are not supposed to "win" in the first place. And, to be honest, players generally have much less mental and moral fortitude than fictional heroes under an author's full control. In my experience, their do-gooder PCs tend to lose hope rather quickly without regular patting on the back and seeing wholly positive effects of their actions.

2)No foundation for decency. Simply put the Creation never had any system of morality, that does not demand from the weak to suck cocks of the strong and like it. That's understandable, because these systems of morality are formulated by the strong for their own benefit, and the weak (read: muggles) get as little say in them as in anything else. But this leaves PCs with very little foundation for not following in the footsteps of everyone with any power in the setting, save for their players' modern sensibilities. Just for example, it is rather unclear, how the fuck anyone in the Creation can come with the idea that slavery is wrong on principle (as opposed to fighting against enslavement of whatever they count as their own people, or hating the world's biggest slave-trading organization), considering that even the idea of sentient beings being equal in any way is utterly alien to existing schools of thought.

3)Hard to build from rotten materials. Simply put, when the general level of douchebaggery around is on the level of Witcher (the game, books are a tiny bit brighter) and worse, i.e., you can, at best, find some decent individuals, but all notable organizations are rotten to the core and led by callous monsters; and you need to work some positive change right now, because the world is about to be obliterated by Cthulhu-powered vampires, you don't really have any choice besided picking the bastards you like more and letting them wipe out bastards you like less. Which isn't exactly the choice that makes people think they are playing shining heroes of light. The only viable third choice anyone came up so far in games I've seen is "Celestial mindfuck" (terrorizing everyone into behaving with your power doesn't really seem a sustainable solution until you've won Exalted). Which isn't exactly a decent way to act as well.


*Even if mortals are somehow reliably protected from being routinely dicked over by gods and Exalted who are inherently vastly more powerful than mortals can possibly aspire to be, there is still the issue of the entire post-Primordial War order being built on constant torture (of the fallen titans), mindrape-slavery of the worst sort (of their spawn, aka demons), and horrible shit victims of the first two do their weaker kin to went their rage.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Okay, White Wolf whores rpg.net moderators managed to inflict enough butthurt on me for making the long-promised rant after all.

Sounds like there's a story behind that!


... and getting you to elaborate on the point in which I've badgered you for, the grimdarkness of the setting seems more like cognitive dissonance/taking things too far rather than a deliberate design decision. I mean, I have the Exalted 2E and 1E books and you are pretty clearly supposed to be a shining hero and supposed to affect real change beyond 'you do things so awesome that people talk about it for centuries, much like Samson and Joshua'.

What's your opinion? I think in this regards Exalted is suffering more from the Sousuke Aizen problem. They want to stack on obstacles on the heroes so that it'll be more impressive when they overcome it. The problem is that if you make the opposition TOO powerful it strains believability once you finally defeat them.

[Lago PARANOIA]

FatR, I'm going into hate withdrawl.

Could you give me a quick writeup on all of the evil Lunar elders? Or link me to threads of people getting pissed at the 1E Lunar sourcebook? Possibly both?

[FatR]

Sounds like there's a story behind that!

See this thread:
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=510652

Noted, how first I get a vague varning presumably related to telling off another poster, and then suddenly I'm happen to be topic banned? Yes, I got no warning before getting banned from forums entirely too (except apparently PMs, which I didn't read). But getting me banned from forums entirely for a week was just a petty additional act of spite on the part of the mod pack. The very act of topic-banning me for no stated reason, is basically White Wolf whores saying that I cannot say bad things about the source of their income, simply because they own the forum and can force me to behave. This is doubly obvious because the ban was done by Stephen Sheppard, a former WW writer - noted how he instead sent his buddies to the thread itself, instead showing there himself, so that the presence of White Wolf's hairy cock in rpg.net's moderators' collective throat won't be immediately obvious? And I don't joke when I say that there was no stated reason for topic banning. This is the PM text I discovered after deciding to look what the fuck exactly happened:

"You're topic-banned. Don't post in Exalted threads ever again.

If you wish to appeal this decision, please contact one of RPGnet's administrators."

But fucking wait, it gets better! The date of this message:

04-20-2010, 06:48 AM.

Now let's look at the date of the message for which Stephen Sheppard, the chief White Wolf whore, immediately slapped me with infraction for violating the topic ban:

04-19-2010, 03:14 PM

Yeah, White Wolf whores don't even try to pretend that their actions are anything but arbitrarily shutting me up. I saved screenshoots to post for anyone interested, by the way.

So yeah, while I freely admit that I now post in Exalted threads exactly because I want Exalted to fail and burn, and don't want it to get any new players (at least unless they understand what the fuck they are getting into), I have every right to call the mod pack White Wolf whores for their action.

More about other topics later.

[Username17]

Ha ha, that's awesome. But you know how these things go: the whny bitch gets the grease.

As for White Wolf going under: they already fired all of their permanent staff. RPG.net may throw a hissy fit if you say that's heralding the end of the company, but it is heralding the end of the company. At this point, each book is wrangled together by a pickup crew and then thrown at the house to get a publisher's imprint and a seal of approval. It's basically no different from a fanfiction approval service.

But if you dare to say that the World of Darkness lines are folding altogether, you're apostate over there.

-Username17

[FatR]

... and getting you to elaborate on the point in which I've badgered you for, the grimdarkness of the setting seems more like cognitive dissonance/taking things too far rather than a deliberate design decision. I mean, I have the Exalted 2E and 1E books and you are pretty clearly supposed to be a shining hero and supposed to affect real change beyond 'you do things so awesome that people talk about it for centuries, much like Samson and Joshua'.

What's your opinion? I think in this regards Exalted is suffering more from the Sousuke Aizen problem. They want to stack on obstacles on the heroes so that it'll be more impressive when they overcome it. The problem is that if you make the opposition TOO powerful it strains believability once you finally defeat them.

I think, that the problem lies in not having a fully coherent design direction to begin with. Exalted was conceived in the times when WoD turned from gonzo shit (they had vampire Helen of Troy in their first city book, you know - and that book was probably their most awesome campaign setting) to Angst Is Serious Fucking Businness attitude (overdose of which, IMHO, was detrimental to oWoD Revised, and contrubuted much to the failure of nWoD). So, Exalted was, from the beginning (as you can see in the thread I've linked above), not meant to be a game, where PCs can win. It was a typical (for that time) WW game, where PCs are supposed to suffer and lose. That's why it included one of WW's trademark mechanics that serve explicitly to screw PCs (Limit Breaks). The only difference was greater contribution of internal factors (said Limit Breaks) for the bad end.

Then they caught up to the fact, that nobody cares about this idea. But forgot to make the memo about that reach every author. So, while some authors quietly eliminated "The world is screwed" attitude, others wrote in unbeatable BBEGs. Overall lack of creative and quality control no doubt have contributed to the latter. Judging by myself, there is something aestethically pleasing in inventing and writing ridiculously powerful beings, particularly when you lack experience and vision to realize the full ramifications of their power. And there were no editors and developers that could have said "no, this shit won't fly". But there also certainly are authors, who are twisted enough to honestly believe, that NPC cockblockers, requiring 2.5 years of weekly play for PCs of the most powerful splat, to have a chance against them are perfectly a-OK. Because there are people, who were later hired to write for Exalted, like Holden Lee Shearer, that said exactly that on forums.

As a side note, the main problem with Aizen is profileration of anime discussions of Internet, that allows whining about truly popular series to accumulate into critical mass. Shonen has a long-standing tradition of making BBEGs that simply are in different category from everyone else, until the hero gets the next upgrade, at least. See: Freeza or Sensui. Asakura Hao or Hanma Yujiro have, so far, far better records of being and remaining totally overpowered for their series. Aizen is just better known.