I honestly don't think the premise of Exalted can work in a rules-heavy system. Exalted wants to mimic things like the Odyssey, Labors of Heracles and the Epic of Gilgamesh. And those things, like most folk stories, are not big on rules. Some times Heracles moves rivers and wrestles giants. Other times Heracles loses a war against Augeas because Augeas has two good warriors (whom Heracles then sneak attacks to death). And yet other times Heracles kills all flies in Olympia because they annoy him.
To play out stories as flexible as the Labors of Heracles you need a rules engine that supports that flexibility. Like FATE. Where sometimes you spend a fate point to bring up the fact that you are the king of Elis and have an army supporting you, and other times you don't and you are just a bro on a boat rampaging across Greece with your bros in the world's most ambitious crossover event. You need an engine that lets you ignore or emphasize aspects of the character depending on the needs of the story.
OSSR: Exalted: The Infernals
Moderator: Moderators
I think this is actually supposed to be a Hellstrider from the artifacts chapter (i.e. next chapter). These are basically discount evangelions made out of demons.FrankTrollman wrote:Frank
The final comic demonstrates a guy hiding in a barn from some soldiers and then summoning a dumb looking demon to slaughter them when they insist on bringing him in for witch-burning. That sounds cooler than it is. Neither the sorcerer nor the summoning ritual is actually shown.
K:
I think this comic is supposed to illustrate that the Infernal Sorerers have combat summoning at dawn and dusk. They use different mechanics for summoning demons.
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Username17
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That depends very greatly on what you think the premise of Exalted is.Longes wrote:I honestly don't think the premise of Exalted can work in a rules-heavy system.
Exalted was created by White Wolf as a D&D killer, and the early versions were being brainstormed before 3rd edition was released, so it was intended to kill 2nd Edition AD&D. And the people who made it were sharply divided about what it meant to be a more "modern" version of D&D.
The "Premise" of Exalted could be any number of the following:
- Like D&D, but with tits.
- Like D&D, but higher powered right from the start.
- Like D&D, but with more fantasy and anime references from after 1980.
- Completely unlike D&D in that it is about telling stories rather than fighting monsters and getting treasure.
- Completely unlike D&D because it focuses on how the character changes the world rather than on how the world changes the character.
And if you are going to radically depart from the path of Dungeons and Dragons, you have to ask yourself actual hard questions like "Do we need character advancement?" And those questions were clearly things that no contributor to Exalted has ever been equipped to properly discuss.
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Username17
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Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals
Chapter Six: Wonders of the Demon Realm
You're not scientists, you're just a bunch of hippies!
37 Pages of... stuff. The chapter starts with more rants about First Age bullshit.
Anyway, every so often the authors of an Exalted book will remember and then refer to a basic fact about the Exalted setting that makes telling stories set in it fundamentally impossible. In this case someone recalled that the Exalted setting is Animist, and in principle every rock and blade of grass has its own Kami.
Literally exactly this.
And of course, Hard Animism is a very weird story conceit which necessarily involves pretty much everything being extremely small and hyper personal because you're fucking negotiating with the river and arguing with trees about whether they would like to be made into tables. You can't do big things if the world isn't basically materialistic because causes don't have effects in a world of spiritual mystery and introspective mysticism.
In Malfeas, none of the rocks and swords have spirits of their own, because they are all made out of the fingernails of big demons. So you can't talk a piece of metal from Hell into being a flower instead, but also it “isn't really iron” so again its physical properties are anyone's guess.
Exalted is like an onion. An onion where every layer is a reason why actually playing this game is equal parts impossible and undesirable. Some of the layers are quite deep and people don't talk about them much, but “In this setting, you can't really predict what the properties of wood, stone, or metal are going to be under any circumstances.” is just as much of a deal breaker as the child rape. In terms of actually playing a cooperative storytelling game of course, not in terms of getting the FBI called on you. No one is going to call the FBI on you for having unresolvable disagreements about setting conceits in a cooperative story. Except maybe George R. R. Martin, because he seems to have some genuinely strange ideas about how intellectual property works.
In practice, you'll be reminded very rarely that objects have least gods inside them. Exalted has its own love language, and that language sounds a lot like "the first rule of Exalted is that we don't dig too hard into the fundamental setting assumptions of Exalted."
Much ink is spilled about magical materials. Some of those materials literally look like spilled ink. I could get into the bit where in reality “vitriol” is clear and in classical alchemy it was considered to be green because they used to get it from ferrous septahydrate crystals, which are green. But the thing about using real words to mean things that they obviously don't mean and made up words for things that have actual words for them and shit is just par for the course in White Wolf products. It scarcely matters. No, the thing that really stands out is that Infernals don't get their own stupid metal affinity, but for a modest XP surcharge they can use the metal affinities of other Exalt types.
It's committed mote cost and not XP.
And that gets us to a pretty perceptive statement by Orion that I'm just going to quote verbatim:
The fact that the Infernals pay more to bond artifact materia makes them in a pragmatic sense worse.They are paying strictly more to get the same benefit anyone else is. But at the limit of infinite experience points, they are better. Because they can use all the different material boosts from obscure books you don't care about. Because these characters are never actually intended to be played from the start, and the writers didn't care about the process at all. The infinite horizon can always exist in the mind, and that mind's conception was and is always what this book was written for.
This goes to the very heart of the fact that this book is literally pornography and is pornographic in nature throughout its entire length. There are different contributing authors, and those different people are masturbating to different things. Sometimes it's relatively normal stuff, like the bondage nuns with big bare breasts. Sometimes it's really horrible stuff like the guro child abuse. But the thing where at least one of the authors is beating off to spending infinite experience points to collect all the advantages and powers from all the books on one hypothetical character is not actually less of an excuse to pound meat than those other things.
Now the broader question you might have is why bother to make it have these drawbacks at all? This is fucking Exalted. People pretty much expect each and every book to be completely fucking bonkers when it comes to quaint ideas like “game balance.” But White Wolf also justifiably has a reputation for encouraging Storytellers to deny the players. Which is why so much of this book is dedicated to powers that either “don't seem that bad” or simply directly bypass Storyteller input altogether.
The fantasy we are reading is one where the player “gets one over” on Mr. Cavern. That Mr. Cavern agrees to allow the character because it “doesn't look that powerful” and then bam, infinity experience points later it's using shapeshifting moonsilver armor with an orichalcum daiklaive and using all the charms off the different lists and finally, finally using the ultimate unfair magic combos to defeat all the named characters in the setting and achieving final victory in Exalted. As pants-wetting fantasies go, it's at least fairly harmless. Much better than the child torture guy. But why anyone would allow someone who jizzed on game design manuscripts be someone who actually wrote semi-official game manuscripts is beyond me. Clearly there's a failure of background checks involved. None of the people who actually wrote any part of this book should have been allowed to write for any company.
I'd agree that as an intellectual exercise, trying to make Exalted "work" can be an amusing pastime, because it clearly doesn't. I've spent a fair amount of time failing to figure out how various adventures would have to be set up to convey the thing they are going for, and I've decided that this is the game you pretend to play because you can't. There are attractive ideas here knotted together with the intellectual equivalent of AIDs, like the serial killer's dreamscape in the Jennifer Lopez movie The Cell, and for some reason both were funded and made.
It's also clear that this game suffers from the old "if someone will basically do it for free, we'll let them." When you are letting people compete for how little money they will take, you shouldn't be surprised when you get bad work on the game design and moral fronts (see Shitmuffin).
Obviously no one is actually going to sit there and Storytell for anyone's character while they get to a meaningful approximation of infinity experience points. Because that's stupid. And Exalted games don't actually last very long because they are stupid and basically unplayable at the best of times. But this bizarre “collect them all” fetish is not inherently dumber than the “Character Optimization” subculture of other game fandoms. Obviously no one plays games long enough for people to “actually play” any of those stupid 20th level builds on the old D&D CharOp boards either. But there are certainly people who find joy in it. Even, as in this case, sexual fulfillment I should suppose.
K and I have even participated in these sorts of things, although mostly to troll. We did do The Wish and The Word, which was a mic drop of collecting all the power from all the lists and using the best loopholes to kill the gods themselves and piss on the setting. That is a thing we did. And this book is basically someone doing that. Just, they are doing it from the standpoint of literally writing the rules and also doing it with their dick in their hand.
To that extent, it's basically Pun-Pun. If your rules-fu isn't good enough to come up with the best combos, go ahead and fucking make something up that says you get to have all the best of everything. Give yourself that participation trophy! Then jizz in it!
The best part is that everyone is right. The combat monster CharOP wanker knows that his character is unbeatable, and that's true for a given definition of unbeatable, but then so is the Sorcerer player, or the Warlord, or the Mindfucker…. Everything relies on the circumstances and nothing defends against everything.
But yes, lest we sound too bitter about this, we do completely acknowledge that the pederasty guy is a worse person and a worse writer and that the fact that their draft was accepted is obviously a worse and less excusable failure on behalf of Richard Thomas. The guy who beats off to hoodwinking Storytellers into letting him catch all the Pokémon is merely puzzling rather than morally offensive.
Heck, you can even learn important lessons here from the hoodwinker. I mean, at least he really does understand the system well enough to place his charges where they will do the most damage.
The other guy… well, my guess is that having this on his resume is not getting him future jobs.
There is much ado made about turning demons into crawling weeping brandy so that you can either pour the demon souls into weapons or drink the demon souls as potions of Essence mote recharge. It's really complicated and I'm sure there's some way to abuse it. Of course, it might just be in here for the atrocity porn, where one of the authors got to discuss cannibalism where the victim is in some sense awake and resisting during both the preparation and the consumption process. Get your guro on, I suppose.
Yeh, its really unnecessary evil. You can't even say that there is some mechanical advantage like you could in Vampire where Diablerie was the only route to power; Chalcanth is not a good way to get motes for the work involved, and you get nothing more from drinking demon souls of others.
The special equipment of Malfeas has a value in vague Resource equivalents. Which is unfortunate. Basically what we have here is a rejection of the D&D demand that we count gold coins, but without an accompanying rejection of the D&D idea of counting special arrows. And so here we are, buying specific numbers of Green Fire Arrows with non-specific numbers of gold coins. The results are pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
I don't even understand how Exalted economies are supposed to exist when they are so many ways to magically generate wealth, even wealth you'd think is impossible to create like more fucking land.
It's the only thing they aren't making more of.
There's certainly an amount of satisfaction to be had remembering to buy the silk rope and the ten foot pole and then using them during your dungeon delve. And there's an amount of satisfaction to be had in counting your silver pieces and realizing that you can buy that chain mail you'd wanted earlier.
But equally, there is an amount of satisfaction to be had in not worrying about how many arrows and pitons your character has and just abstracting all that stuff. The backpacks of adventurers could be entirely quantum, having or not having relevant equipment as required to move the story forward. There's no right or wrong answer, the amount of asspulling and Logistics & Dragons that each player wants to do at the table is very personal and won't even be the same night to night. Sometimes you want to play the ropes and pulleys minigame, sometimes you just want to get drunk and smash Orcs.
But Exalted's attempt to abstract the number of coins in a character's pocket but not abstract any of the other objects in the character's pockets, including the ones that were bought with coins was... not fortuitous.
Luckily, I think you really aren't supposed to. Let the peons worry where the bread comes from because the PCs are distorting reality for more bread when they need it.
Exalted has a lot of Artifacts. Which are magic items that are shit simple to start play with, but very difficult to figure out how or if you can pick them up in game. Some of these have cool descriptions. Some of them are mechanically “good” for the number of background dots they cost. And as you might have guessed, the overlap between those are approximately proportional and thus many things people want to like are actually “not worth it” and many things people are “supposed to use” are dumb as fuck.
To that extent, the list of artifacts in The Infernals is not really better, worse, or even different than any other collection of artifacts one might find in any Exalted book.
There are some standouts.
There is an armor with a Perfect Defense. There is a shield that can parry attacks that can't be parried. Hellforged Wonders are the cursed magic item rules that the game has needed for a while. While Rome was burning, someone was clearly checking things off their wishlist.
The mechanics in this chapter are not good. Some of them don't even exist. There are gloves that let you dribble bright green poison from your fingertips. What does it do? I have no idea. The point is that it's fucking green and that's all you get to know.
I did some checking around the rest of the chapter to see if “green venom” was like a thing, but it's not. There are a lot of poisons in this book, and a lot of them are green. Lots of stuff in this book are green. The players have the word “green” in their exalt type name.
There is a chart at the bottom of the page with the stats on the glove and the poison.
Cubits are the same thing, except for length instead of weight and also there aren't any people who collectively use cubits, because cubits are terrible. It's roughly half a yard, but fuck that. Fuck the people who try to use that shit. It doesn't make you sound old timey and full of mythic portents, it makes you sound like someone who looked at a fucking wikipedia page about deprecated archaic measures.
It's almost like this book wasn't edited.
Many of the items do weirdly poetic things and have really long backstories. One item is a sword that makes one person stop being friends with the person it kills. I don't know why you'd care about doing that, and the mechanics are that there are fucking more layers of die rolls and accounting in the middle of combat and the whole thing is just more unplayable than Exalted Combat already is – adding more of everything that already makes Exalted Combat terrible.
But the really surprising thing about their terribly designed object that no one will ever use is that its description is over two hundred and fifty words and is itself a three paragraph essay with an introduction, body, and conclusion. This item alone could be a 6th grade English assignment. Why?
I'm not entirely against the "magic item as story or character". Certainly, it can jazz up the experience since it follows the fantasy novel trope and not video game trope.
I'm pretty sure that when you add up all the variant types of weapons and armor that there are actually more of these fucking things than there are Green Sun Princes to use them. A lot of blades come in different sizes and could be a dagger or a scythe or something in between.
Any demons might be using them, so it's not a problem. No player character would bother with many of these, but you might see them in the hands of some badguy mini-boss.
Fundamentally, Exalted never had enough magic items, so this list is trying to address that. Even if these items don't get bought by PCs, evil enemies were supposed to be dropping them sometimes and the players were supposed to worry about using them in the fights to come.
Many items aren't something that you'd ever take as a character prop. Not because they aren't worth the points (although many of them obviously are not), but because they literally are a story. A compass that points to a specific secret gateway that goes to another world is not something that you're going to want to own unless you're in the adventure where you are going to that place to have an encounter to go on to the next chapter of your story.
It's not a piece of character equipment as such, it's an unfinished story seed. But it has a dot value attached to it, in case you wanted to start with it as a player character. Which obviously, you do not.
You have to remember that the guy with some version of Wyld-Shaping can build Artifacts in a few days and how fast he can do that is based on those ratings. There is literally nothing stopping him from having as many or as few of these things other than committed motes or the requirement for a Hearthstone.
The Hellstriders are giant robots made out of demon parts. I am unclear as to what narrative or mechanical purpose these are supposed to have. The descriptions and rules drag on for several pages and I am totally at a loss as to why this is happening.
Exalted groans and collapses when you ask it to do regular combat. Who actually thought that you could do a Battletech minigame inside it?
In a broader sense, nothing in Exalted is ever brought to the “refining” stage. It's all epicycles and brainstorming. Every ability and effect adds more die rolls, more math, more more more. A design isn't complete when there's nothing left to add, it's complete when there's nothing left to take away. Nothing in Exalted has ever got to the part of the design where things are starting to be simplified. Not one person writing on this has ever asked “Wouldn't it be simpler if we....”
Things have been written on the white board, but nothing has been crossed out. We aren't there yet. We will never be there yet. White Wolf has gone bankrupt again, and Exalted 3rd edition was a weird abortion that didn't even appear in game stores. This meeting will never end because it can never end. It's just an idea cloud scribbled furiously on a whiteboard, the contributors long left for lunch and they are never coming back. And if anyone came back into this office we know with perfect certainty that they would never clean this white board up. They wouldn't even wash the groady coffee cups left on the table – they'd just go back to furiously brainstorming more ideas and scribbling them down until they too had to leave and get on with their lives in the real world outside the meeting that never ends because it never had a purpose in the first place.
In a very real way, this is an early draft, and the most compelling fantasy on display here is the fantasy that the game can be redeemed and redesigned in some science-fiction future. I guess that's yet another reason I've been looking these books over.
Exalted is an interesting game to study because it is so ambitious. It's the first published heartbreaker, and they tried to do everything and be everything rather than going the route of DnD with its combat system with some rules-lite for everything else. That they failed on so many fronts was predictable, but that doesn't mean that this doesn't mean there aren't lessons to be learned here. At the very least, you can learn a lot of things NOT to do.
The final comic of the chapter is about our Bondage Nun getting shown a cowboy exalted hero who is locked in a crystal in a tomb in the desert. Why is there are cowboy with two six guns? Why fucking not?
;s the
I assume this is a reference to some Exalted plotline or another, and I don't care. The Exalted people can of course make their flavor be whatever they want, but “cowboys” is kind of a heavy lift. If Exalted hadn't jumped the shark before it was even debuted, this might have been its shark jumping moment.
I think it's one of the old-time Solars. In one of the Direction books it drops that not every Solar Exaltation made it into the Jade Prison, so my guess is that one of the homebrew plots involved high-end Solars because the idea of one of the recent Solars being a threat is laughable.
Next Up: Chapter 7: Storytelling.
Chapter Six: Wonders of the Demon Realm
You're not scientists, you're just a bunch of hippies!
Frank
37 Pages of... stuff. The chapter starts with more rants about First Age bullshit.
Anyway, every so often the authors of an Exalted book will remember and then refer to a basic fact about the Exalted setting that makes telling stories set in it fundamentally impossible. In this case someone recalled that the Exalted setting is Animist, and in principle every rock and blade of grass has its own Kami.
Literally exactly this.
And of course, Hard Animism is a very weird story conceit which necessarily involves pretty much everything being extremely small and hyper personal because you're fucking negotiating with the river and arguing with trees about whether they would like to be made into tables. You can't do big things if the world isn't basically materialistic because causes don't have effects in a world of spiritual mystery and introspective mysticism.
In Malfeas, none of the rocks and swords have spirits of their own, because they are all made out of the fingernails of big demons. So you can't talk a piece of metal from Hell into being a flower instead, but also it “isn't really iron” so again its physical properties are anyone's guess.
Exalted is like an onion. An onion where every layer is a reason why actually playing this game is equal parts impossible and undesirable. Some of the layers are quite deep and people don't talk about them much, but “In this setting, you can't really predict what the properties of wood, stone, or metal are going to be under any circumstances.” is just as much of a deal breaker as the child rape. In terms of actually playing a cooperative storytelling game of course, not in terms of getting the FBI called on you. No one is going to call the FBI on you for having unresolvable disagreements about setting conceits in a cooperative story. Except maybe George R. R. Martin, because he seems to have some genuinely strange ideas about how intellectual property works.
K:
In practice, you'll be reminded very rarely that objects have least gods inside them. Exalted has its own love language, and that language sounds a lot like "the first rule of Exalted is that we don't dig too hard into the fundamental setting assumptions of Exalted."
Frank
Much ink is spilled about magical materials. Some of those materials literally look like spilled ink. I could get into the bit where in reality “vitriol” is clear and in classical alchemy it was considered to be green because they used to get it from ferrous septahydrate crystals, which are green. But the thing about using real words to mean things that they obviously don't mean and made up words for things that have actual words for them and shit is just par for the course in White Wolf products. It scarcely matters. No, the thing that really stands out is that Infernals don't get their own stupid metal affinity, but for a modest XP surcharge they can use the metal affinities of other Exalt types.
K:
It's committed mote cost and not XP.
Frank
And that gets us to a pretty perceptive statement by Orion that I'm just going to quote verbatim:
The Infernals is essentially this natural trend of Exalted reaching its natural endpoint. Exalted was never a game, it was a book club. And Infernals is what happens when members of the book club become ascended fanboys and start writing the material going forward. So some of that is the stuff about grim dark horribleness. But a lot of that is just the deliberate creation of more sudokus and crossword puzzles for the book club members to solve.Orion wrote:Reading and comprehending these books is way too damn hard for them to actually function as the rules of a game; in fact, they're so hard to read attempting to comprehend them becomes the game. I created myself 2 or 3 sample character from each of the main Exalt types, and while the process convinced me that the game was in no way playable, it was weirdly satisfying like solving a sudoku or a crossword.
I suspect this is what drove all the online Exalted fandom. There really was a crowd of gamers on the White Wold forums who loved Exalted. I used to lurk there. The thing is, the online fan club was more a club of Exalted readers than Exalted players. I don't just mean that they weren't playing the game. I mean they literally acted like a book club or a college Lit class, spending a lot of their time arguing about themes and constructing harmonized readings with extensive bibliographies. There were even some celebrity posters who took the role of sages, initiating the other posters into esoteric readings of the backstory.
The fact that the Infernals pay more to bond artifact materia makes them in a pragmatic sense worse.They are paying strictly more to get the same benefit anyone else is. But at the limit of infinite experience points, they are better. Because they can use all the different material boosts from obscure books you don't care about. Because these characters are never actually intended to be played from the start, and the writers didn't care about the process at all. The infinite horizon can always exist in the mind, and that mind's conception was and is always what this book was written for.
This goes to the very heart of the fact that this book is literally pornography and is pornographic in nature throughout its entire length. There are different contributing authors, and those different people are masturbating to different things. Sometimes it's relatively normal stuff, like the bondage nuns with big bare breasts. Sometimes it's really horrible stuff like the guro child abuse. But the thing where at least one of the authors is beating off to spending infinite experience points to collect all the advantages and powers from all the books on one hypothetical character is not actually less of an excuse to pound meat than those other things.
Now the broader question you might have is why bother to make it have these drawbacks at all? This is fucking Exalted. People pretty much expect each and every book to be completely fucking bonkers when it comes to quaint ideas like “game balance.” But White Wolf also justifiably has a reputation for encouraging Storytellers to deny the players. Which is why so much of this book is dedicated to powers that either “don't seem that bad” or simply directly bypass Storyteller input altogether.
The fantasy we are reading is one where the player “gets one over” on Mr. Cavern. That Mr. Cavern agrees to allow the character because it “doesn't look that powerful” and then bam, infinity experience points later it's using shapeshifting moonsilver armor with an orichalcum daiklaive and using all the charms off the different lists and finally, finally using the ultimate unfair magic combos to defeat all the named characters in the setting and achieving final victory in Exalted. As pants-wetting fantasies go, it's at least fairly harmless. Much better than the child torture guy. But why anyone would allow someone who jizzed on game design manuscripts be someone who actually wrote semi-official game manuscripts is beyond me. Clearly there's a failure of background checks involved. None of the people who actually wrote any part of this book should have been allowed to write for any company.
K:
I'd agree that as an intellectual exercise, trying to make Exalted "work" can be an amusing pastime, because it clearly doesn't. I've spent a fair amount of time failing to figure out how various adventures would have to be set up to convey the thing they are going for, and I've decided that this is the game you pretend to play because you can't. There are attractive ideas here knotted together with the intellectual equivalent of AIDs, like the serial killer's dreamscape in the Jennifer Lopez movie The Cell, and for some reason both were funded and made.
It's also clear that this game suffers from the old "if someone will basically do it for free, we'll let them." When you are letting people compete for how little money they will take, you shouldn't be surprised when you get bad work on the game design and moral fronts (see Shitmuffin).
Frank
Obviously no one is actually going to sit there and Storytell for anyone's character while they get to a meaningful approximation of infinity experience points. Because that's stupid. And Exalted games don't actually last very long because they are stupid and basically unplayable at the best of times. But this bizarre “collect them all” fetish is not inherently dumber than the “Character Optimization” subculture of other game fandoms. Obviously no one plays games long enough for people to “actually play” any of those stupid 20th level builds on the old D&D CharOp boards either. But there are certainly people who find joy in it. Even, as in this case, sexual fulfillment I should suppose.
K and I have even participated in these sorts of things, although mostly to troll. We did do The Wish and The Word, which was a mic drop of collecting all the power from all the lists and using the best loopholes to kill the gods themselves and piss on the setting. That is a thing we did. And this book is basically someone doing that. Just, they are doing it from the standpoint of literally writing the rules and also doing it with their dick in their hand.
To that extent, it's basically Pun-Pun. If your rules-fu isn't good enough to come up with the best combos, go ahead and fucking make something up that says you get to have all the best of everything. Give yourself that participation trophy! Then jizz in it!
K:
The best part is that everyone is right. The combat monster CharOP wanker knows that his character is unbeatable, and that's true for a given definition of unbeatable, but then so is the Sorcerer player, or the Warlord, or the Mindfucker…. Everything relies on the circumstances and nothing defends against everything.
Frank
But yes, lest we sound too bitter about this, we do completely acknowledge that the pederasty guy is a worse person and a worse writer and that the fact that their draft was accepted is obviously a worse and less excusable failure on behalf of Richard Thomas. The guy who beats off to hoodwinking Storytellers into letting him catch all the Pokémon is merely puzzling rather than morally offensive.
K:
Heck, you can even learn important lessons here from the hoodwinker. I mean, at least he really does understand the system well enough to place his charges where they will do the most damage.
The other guy… well, my guess is that having this on his resume is not getting him future jobs.
Frank
There is much ado made about turning demons into crawling weeping brandy so that you can either pour the demon souls into weapons or drink the demon souls as potions of Essence mote recharge. It's really complicated and I'm sure there's some way to abuse it. Of course, it might just be in here for the atrocity porn, where one of the authors got to discuss cannibalism where the victim is in some sense awake and resisting during both the preparation and the consumption process. Get your guro on, I suppose.
K:
Yeh, its really unnecessary evil. You can't even say that there is some mechanical advantage like you could in Vampire where Diablerie was the only route to power; Chalcanth is not a good way to get motes for the work involved, and you get nothing more from drinking demon souls of others.
Frank
The special equipment of Malfeas has a value in vague Resource equivalents. Which is unfortunate. Basically what we have here is a rejection of the D&D demand that we count gold coins, but without an accompanying rejection of the D&D idea of counting special arrows. And so here we are, buying specific numbers of Green Fire Arrows with non-specific numbers of gold coins. The results are pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
K:
I don't even understand how Exalted economies are supposed to exist when they are so many ways to magically generate wealth, even wealth you'd think is impossible to create like more fucking land.
It's the only thing they aren't making more of.
Frank
There's certainly an amount of satisfaction to be had remembering to buy the silk rope and the ten foot pole and then using them during your dungeon delve. And there's an amount of satisfaction to be had in counting your silver pieces and realizing that you can buy that chain mail you'd wanted earlier.
But equally, there is an amount of satisfaction to be had in not worrying about how many arrows and pitons your character has and just abstracting all that stuff. The backpacks of adventurers could be entirely quantum, having or not having relevant equipment as required to move the story forward. There's no right or wrong answer, the amount of asspulling and Logistics & Dragons that each player wants to do at the table is very personal and won't even be the same night to night. Sometimes you want to play the ropes and pulleys minigame, sometimes you just want to get drunk and smash Orcs.
But Exalted's attempt to abstract the number of coins in a character's pocket but not abstract any of the other objects in the character's pockets, including the ones that were bought with coins was... not fortuitous.
K:
Luckily, I think you really aren't supposed to. Let the peons worry where the bread comes from because the PCs are distorting reality for more bread when they need it.
Frank
Exalted has a lot of Artifacts. Which are magic items that are shit simple to start play with, but very difficult to figure out how or if you can pick them up in game. Some of these have cool descriptions. Some of them are mechanically “good” for the number of background dots they cost. And as you might have guessed, the overlap between those are approximately proportional and thus many things people want to like are actually “not worth it” and many things people are “supposed to use” are dumb as fuck.
To that extent, the list of artifacts in The Infernals is not really better, worse, or even different than any other collection of artifacts one might find in any Exalted book.
K:
There are some standouts.
There is an armor with a Perfect Defense. There is a shield that can parry attacks that can't be parried. Hellforged Wonders are the cursed magic item rules that the game has needed for a while. While Rome was burning, someone was clearly checking things off their wishlist.
Frank
The mechanics in this chapter are not good. Some of them don't even exist. There are gloves that let you dribble bright green poison from your fingertips. What does it do? I have no idea. The point is that it's fucking green and that's all you get to know.
I did some checking around the rest of the chapter to see if “green venom” was like a thing, but it's not. There are a lot of poisons in this book, and a lot of them are green. Lots of stuff in this book are green. The players have the word “green” in their exalt type name.
K:
There is a chart at the bottom of the page with the stats on the glove and the poison.
Frank
Very frequently, British patients will attempt to tell me their weight in stones. Stones are a useless measurement that is 14 pounds. Nothing in your life is “about a stone.” You do not purchase, build, acquire, or dispose of anything in amounts that are “about a stone”. It's fucking stupid, and people who use stones as a unit of measure in their everyday lives are wrong to do so.The Infernals wrote:This cubit-long rod of brass
Cubits are the same thing, except for length instead of weight and also there aren't any people who collectively use cubits, because cubits are terrible. It's roughly half a yard, but fuck that. Fuck the people who try to use that shit. It doesn't make you sound old timey and full of mythic portents, it makes you sound like someone who looked at a fucking wikipedia page about deprecated archaic measures.
K:
It's almost like this book wasn't edited.
Frank
Many of the items do weirdly poetic things and have really long backstories. One item is a sword that makes one person stop being friends with the person it kills. I don't know why you'd care about doing that, and the mechanics are that there are fucking more layers of die rolls and accounting in the middle of combat and the whole thing is just more unplayable than Exalted Combat already is – adding more of everything that already makes Exalted Combat terrible.
But the really surprising thing about their terribly designed object that no one will ever use is that its description is over two hundred and fifty words and is itself a three paragraph essay with an introduction, body, and conclusion. This item alone could be a 6th grade English assignment. Why?
K:
I'm not entirely against the "magic item as story or character". Certainly, it can jazz up the experience since it follows the fantasy novel trope and not video game trope.
Frank
I'm pretty sure that when you add up all the variant types of weapons and armor that there are actually more of these fucking things than there are Green Sun Princes to use them. A lot of blades come in different sizes and could be a dagger or a scythe or something in between.
K:
Any demons might be using them, so it's not a problem. No player character would bother with many of these, but you might see them in the hands of some badguy mini-boss.
Fundamentally, Exalted never had enough magic items, so this list is trying to address that. Even if these items don't get bought by PCs, evil enemies were supposed to be dropping them sometimes and the players were supposed to worry about using them in the fights to come.
Frank
Many items aren't something that you'd ever take as a character prop. Not because they aren't worth the points (although many of them obviously are not), but because they literally are a story. A compass that points to a specific secret gateway that goes to another world is not something that you're going to want to own unless you're in the adventure where you are going to that place to have an encounter to go on to the next chapter of your story.
It's not a piece of character equipment as such, it's an unfinished story seed. But it has a dot value attached to it, in case you wanted to start with it as a player character. Which obviously, you do not.
K:
You have to remember that the guy with some version of Wyld-Shaping can build Artifacts in a few days and how fast he can do that is based on those ratings. There is literally nothing stopping him from having as many or as few of these things other than committed motes or the requirement for a Hearthstone.
Frank
The Hellstriders are giant robots made out of demon parts. I am unclear as to what narrative or mechanical purpose these are supposed to have. The descriptions and rules drag on for several pages and I am totally at a loss as to why this is happening.
Exalted groans and collapses when you ask it to do regular combat. Who actually thought that you could do a Battletech minigame inside it?
In a broader sense, nothing in Exalted is ever brought to the “refining” stage. It's all epicycles and brainstorming. Every ability and effect adds more die rolls, more math, more more more. A design isn't complete when there's nothing left to add, it's complete when there's nothing left to take away. Nothing in Exalted has ever got to the part of the design where things are starting to be simplified. Not one person writing on this has ever asked “Wouldn't it be simpler if we....”
Things have been written on the white board, but nothing has been crossed out. We aren't there yet. We will never be there yet. White Wolf has gone bankrupt again, and Exalted 3rd edition was a weird abortion that didn't even appear in game stores. This meeting will never end because it can never end. It's just an idea cloud scribbled furiously on a whiteboard, the contributors long left for lunch and they are never coming back. And if anyone came back into this office we know with perfect certainty that they would never clean this white board up. They wouldn't even wash the groady coffee cups left on the table – they'd just go back to furiously brainstorming more ideas and scribbling them down until they too had to leave and get on with their lives in the real world outside the meeting that never ends because it never had a purpose in the first place.
K:
In a very real way, this is an early draft, and the most compelling fantasy on display here is the fantasy that the game can be redeemed and redesigned in some science-fiction future. I guess that's yet another reason I've been looking these books over.
Exalted is an interesting game to study because it is so ambitious. It's the first published heartbreaker, and they tried to do everything and be everything rather than going the route of DnD with its combat system with some rules-lite for everything else. That they failed on so many fronts was predictable, but that doesn't mean that this doesn't mean there aren't lessons to be learned here. At the very least, you can learn a lot of things NOT to do.
Frank
The final comic of the chapter is about our Bondage Nun getting shown a cowboy exalted hero who is locked in a crystal in a tomb in the desert. Why is there are cowboy with two six guns? Why fucking not?
;s the
I assume this is a reference to some Exalted plotline or another, and I don't care. The Exalted people can of course make their flavor be whatever they want, but “cowboys” is kind of a heavy lift. If Exalted hadn't jumped the shark before it was even debuted, this might have been its shark jumping moment.
K:
I think it's one of the old-time Solars. In one of the Direction books it drops that not every Solar Exaltation made it into the Jade Prison, so my guess is that one of the homebrew plots involved high-end Solars because the idea of one of the recent Solars being a threat is laughable.
Frank
Next Up: Chapter 7: Storytelling.
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Heaven's Thunder Hammer
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Good analysis.
One thing that gets me about the rape in the intro is that when it came out in 2009... I was on the Big Purple RPG.net a lot. I don't recall anyone complaining about it.
And then circa 2014 it became this taboo "too far" thing. Maybe I remember things wrong. But it's funny to me how offended everyone is *now*, but no one was *then*.
One thing that gets me about the rape in the intro is that when it came out in 2009... I was on the Big Purple RPG.net a lot. I don't recall anyone complaining about it.
And then circa 2014 it became this taboo "too far" thing. Maybe I remember things wrong. But it's funny to me how offended everyone is *now*, but no one was *then*.
Wait, what's this about Infernals paying more to attune to artifacts?
Everyone pays double to attune to an artifact if the artifact doesn't match their Exalted type*. (Solars resonate with orichalcum, Lunars with moonsilver, and so on.) That's a general rule and not just for Infernals -- it's in the corebook. However, Infernals can resonate with artifacts made from any magical material (meaning they don't have to pay double anymore) as long as they corrupted the thing with vitriol first.
Nobody pays the double cost. You dip the sword in demon acid and move on. Overall, they're really better off than anyone else artifact-wise, as long as you didn't want to lend your magic sword to your non-Infernal buddy.
(AFAIK the best artifact thing was using jade to reduce the speed of your weapon, but errata made 3 the minimum speed no matter what you did.)
*to be most accurate, you pay double if you want to gain the bonus the artifact gets from the material it's made from. You can also pay the normal attunement cost and not get the material bonus. (There's also a 1-dot artifact in another book that you can slap onto another artifact and then attune for normal cost no matter what it's made from.)
Everyone pays double to attune to an artifact if the artifact doesn't match their Exalted type*. (Solars resonate with orichalcum, Lunars with moonsilver, and so on.) That's a general rule and not just for Infernals -- it's in the corebook. However, Infernals can resonate with artifacts made from any magical material (meaning they don't have to pay double anymore) as long as they corrupted the thing with vitriol first.
Nobody pays the double cost. You dip the sword in demon acid and move on. Overall, they're really better off than anyone else artifact-wise, as long as you didn't want to lend your magic sword to your non-Infernal buddy.
(AFAIK the best artifact thing was using jade to reduce the speed of your weapon, but errata made 3 the minimum speed no matter what you did.)
*to be most accurate, you pay double if you want to gain the bonus the artifact gets from the material it's made from. You can also pay the normal attunement cost and not get the material bonus. (There's also a 1-dot artifact in another book that you can slap onto another artifact and then attune for normal cost no matter what it's made from.)
Last edited by Jefepato on Tue Apr 02, 2019 7:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
His name is The Nameless Solar, because of course it is. He is a recurring name in Exalted lore primarily known for being a Big Good Demonslayer and having invented gun kata martial art that uses guns. And I say "name", because he doesn't really have any character. He's Clint Eastwood expy writers pull out when they want to jack off to guns instead of swords.The final comic of the chapter is about our Bondage Nun getting shown a cowboy exalted hero who is locked in a crystal in a tomb in the desert. Why is there are cowboy with two six guns? Why fucking not?
A good theory, but from my experience with exalted fans they were just that insane/delusional to try to try to play and mindcaulk everything.FrankTrollman wrote: I suspect this is what drove all the online Exalted fandom. There really was a crowd of gamers on the White Wold forums who loved Exalted. I used to lurk there. The thing is, the online fan club was more a club of Exalted readers than Exalted players. I don't just mean that they weren't playing the game. I mean they literally acted like a book club or a college Lit class, spending a lot of their time arguing about themes and constructing harmonized readings with extensive bibliographies. There were even some celebrity posters who took the role of sages, initiating the other posters into esoteric readings of the backstory.
The Infernals is essentially this natural trend of Exalted reaching its natural endpoint. Exalted was never a game, it was a book club. And Infernals is what happens when members of the book club become ascended fanboys and start writing the material going forward. So some of that is the stuff about grim dark horribleness. But a lot of that is just the deliberate creation of more sudokus and crossword puzzles for the book club members to solve.
Like I met one who went around making some big speeches about how Exalted was such a good and versatile system for properly playing "epic" characters of all kinds and when they got down to describing their favorite exalted campaign moment... It was about finding a water source for their character's tribe. It wasn't even "the world has run out of water", it was just a tiny tribe living in a wasteland.
And when asked why didn't they just have a charm to magic out a water source or went to punch the god of rain, they started tripping over themselves trying to make excuses for why their "epic" exalted characters couldn't solve the water shortage for a few people in a single session.
FrankTrollman wrote: Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.
There are loads of little bits and pieces in Exalted books where it's easy to come up with a fun character concept (whether it's art featuring boobs, or a Charm that has a cool idea to it), and some of them are easier to fit into a working system than others. Like, I don't know what you'd do for an Alchemical if you want to focus on the sort-of-robotic aspects as well as swapping your bits and pieces out overnight (the first could be done withliterally describes a Street-Sam in Shadowrun, the second sounds like a D&D Wizard of all things, except with the powers being more obvious things more like the Blue Chakra stuff).
I don't know how many games have room for characters who have the powers of "making a bureaucracy more or less efficient" and "coasting by doing nothing for this longterm project and yet avoiding all blame". Similarly "get people to worship me -> gain power" sounds more like the kind of thing you get in games where you're already pseudo-gods and basically don't go around adventuring or interacting with the real world, like Knobless.
A lot of the Infernals stuff on the other hand, you could basically just do as a D&D thing. A martial artist who breaks oaths and curses by punching them? Tome Monk, ask for a custom Fighting Style (Master? Grand Master?) that applies Break Enchantment or Dispel Law or something. Done. Wasteland priest (and/or bondage nun) who afflicts people with sandstorms and plagues of locusts? Druid or Kaelik's Blighter, done. Admittedly I can't off the top of my head tell you how to play a crab-mummy but it's probably doable.
I don't know how many games have room for characters who have the powers of "making a bureaucracy more or less efficient" and "coasting by doing nothing for this longterm project and yet avoiding all blame". Similarly "get people to worship me -> gain power" sounds more like the kind of thing you get in games where you're already pseudo-gods and basically don't go around adventuring or interacting with the real world, like Knobless.
A lot of the Infernals stuff on the other hand, you could basically just do as a D&D thing. A martial artist who breaks oaths and curses by punching them? Tome Monk, ask for a custom Fighting Style (Master? Grand Master?) that applies Break Enchantment or Dispel Law or something. Done. Wasteland priest (and/or bondage nun) who afflicts people with sandstorms and plagues of locusts? Druid or Kaelik's Blighter, done. Admittedly I can't off the top of my head tell you how to play a crab-mummy but it's probably doable.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
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JigokuBosatsu
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At first I honestly thought this said "The Nameless Sloar" and thought it was a Ghostbusters reference, and am now very sad it is not so.Longes wrote: His name is The Nameless Solar, because of course it is.
Omegonthesane wrote:a glass armonica which causes a target city to have horrific nightmares that prevent sleep
JigokuBosatsu wrote:so a regular glass armonica?
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Username17
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The most charitable explanation of course is that people usually don't read the fluff in splat books at all. Like, there's big sections of The Silver Marches that I have never read and I'm never going to read. If there was some part of that book where it just went off on a homophobic tirade or tried to educate us on the difference between pedo- and hebe- I wouldn't know. Because I've never read through the long boring fluff sections of that book. The usual way that players of a game read an RPG supplement is by skimming to find the crunch, then going back and reading the fluff if they are still interested. It could take quite a while for people to notice horrible shit stated in sidebars in the middle of a boring fluff chapter.Heaven's Thunder Hammer wrote:Good analysis.
One thing that gets me about the rape in the intro is that when it came out in 2009... I was on the Big Purple RPG.net a lot. I don't recall anyone complaining about it.
And then circa 2014 it became this taboo "too far" thing. Maybe I remember things wrong. But it's funny to me how offended everyone is *now*, but no one was *then*.
That being said, I don't think that fully covers it. For fuck's sake, The Infernals has a pornographic comic in it. You notice that shit just flipping through.
A more likely explanation is that in 2009, RPG.net had a very explicit "don't talk smack about White Wolf" policy. Multiple people who freelanced for White Wolf were also mods at RPG.net and talking shit about White Wolf could get you a warning, a time-out, or even a perma ban. This was about the point that I matter-of-factly pointed out that the New World of Darkness was a failed project and was in the process of being discontinued as a supported game. I was told point-blank that if I didn't drop the subject that I would get smacked with an official warning and banned from the site.
So it's very likely that people were as horrified by the contents of The Infernals in 2009 as they are now. But in 2009 White Wolf was treated as a "real company" that major forums wanted to suck up to. And as such, people did not feel free to levy complaints about officially branded White Wolf content on RPG.net or similar sites. A few years later, CCP dropped the pretense of supporting White Wolf pen-and-paper RPGs.
It's very interesting that you'd say that you noticed people come out of the woodwork to condemn The Infernals in 2014, because that's the year that CCP discontinued work on the Vampire MMO and the entire body of White Wolf RPGs became recognized as abandonware. That would of course equally be the point at which all the RPG.net mods would stop trying to suck up to the White Wolf "establishment" as they would have then realized that they no longer existed.
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I'm pretty sure that 100% of the discussion about the Infernals was being spearheaded by Something Awful, and everywhere else was an echo of that.
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Username17
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Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals
Chapter Seven: Storytelling
Weird tortures in a ghastly abode of horrors? I'm so in!
My apologies for the lateness and weirdness of this chapter review. My entire portion of this chapter got completely swallowed by an auto-update triggered by my anti-virus. So rather than going section by section again, I'll be ranting about storytelling and relating it back to this chapter. You probably don't really care about the weird bit about trying to play a game set in the ancient past with the book about characters that literally did not exist before last Thursday anyway.
The chapter has 11 pages of text and is followed by an extra long comic. But nothing actually happens in that comic, so those 11 pages are the entire space this book has left itself to make the case that it is playable as a game in any context. Spoiler: it does not succeed.
The comics are mood pieces. They are deliberately not stories, but just partial snapshots of events.
It's an adventure hook. I could write an adventure with just that little to inspire it, and it would look completely different from six other people's version of the same.
In a Dungeons & Dragons centered view of cooperative storytelling we often discuss how characters contribute to the story in terms of their ability to contribute to the group overcoming challenges. And that's because D&D is based on the adventure serial form of story as its central story to tell. There's no particular reason that you couldn't have a cooperative storytelling game where you told other kinds of stories and the contribution of characters wasn't measured in their ability to defuse a bomb or slay a manticore. You could be telling horror stories where a character's contribution to the story was to be overall likable in a way where it would be emotionally affecting when they got killed by the slasher. The sky's the limit. In an ensemble protagonist cooperative storytelling game, every character needs to have a contribution, but that contribution doesn't have to be a sword arm or an archer's aim, it just has to be something relevant to whatever stories you're actually telling.
One of the people writing this book thought that what we should be doing is making Greek Tragedies, where every character's contribution was their core personal failing that caused everything to end up disastrously wrong. Which is an out-there but totally reasonable goal. This book does not commit to this. Like, at all. The other authors and the editor apparently thought this was “totally insane” and we actually get a sidebar rebuttal to the concept that is no-shit entitled “I don't want to play a character who sucks.”
This is actually pretty key. What we have here is an actual upgrade on the core thesis of Exalted where you play rockin' tacos godlings punching their way through stuff for fun and profit.
This section really does ask you to make a character with dramatic potential, but it accepts that some people are not ready for that. At the end of the day, you can only play an RPG with the players you've got, and some of them are not going to want to play a character with a complex inner life. Compromises are going to be made, and several parts of this chapter really do talk about the kinds of campaign that you might need to experiment with before you find a playable mix.
What stories can our Bondage Nun, Slayer, Crab Mummy, and Sex Ninja meaningfully contribute to together? I don't have an answer for that, and neither does the book. If a character has powers, you probably want those powers to impact on the story in some way. You could tell a story about paperwork problems in a meaningless middle class work environment with a character who could turn into a bat, but everyone would justifiably ask what the actual fuck you thought you were doing. The characters in Exalted have super powers. For various reasons they have less identifiable powers than they have Charms, but they still each have multiple powers that you'd expect to be pretty different one to another. What kind of story could accommodate characters with those disparate abilities in a way that wouldn't totally trivialize the abilities of one or more of them? What would that even look like?
We usually think of problems such as this in terms of balance. That you have situations like BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner; where the characters might broadly participate in the same kinds of adventures, but one character is clearly better at it than the other. One might justifiably ask why BMX Bandit is here at all, when he's basically not as good at crime fighting as even one of the angels that Angel Summoner brings as a six pack. But even then, you can imagine that there are goals like “saving civilians” and “fighting bad guys” that both BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner want to advance. BMX Bandit isn't contributing nearly as much as Angel Summoner, but they are both fighting on the same side, advancing the same goals, and generally contributing to the same story in complementary ways.
Exalted's problem is more one of concept. I don't really give a fuck whether the Bondage Nun or the Slayer is “better” than the other, because it's not at all obvious what stories you could tell where both ability sets would even come up. The characters might as well be Batman and the Koolaid Man.
Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit is a fine parody of imbalance, but more than other games, Exalted at its core is about things being entirely imbalanced. The combat monster is supposed to tear through combats so that the diplomancer isn't supposed to have to. Each character should shine alone.
That means that the adventures have to be tailored to the talents of the characters. If someone fails to make a diplomancer, there are no courtly intrigue events. No combat monster, no duels or raids. No sorcerer character, then no sorcerer enemies.
Most RPGs have that assumption baked in less noticeably. For example, I once had a DnD 2e game where I wanted to play a Psionicist, but when I mentioned it my DM told everyone that if I did, he'd be forced to introduce psionic monsters and enemies…. As you can imagine, the party vetoed me. Character composition affects adventure choice.
I imagine that running an Exalted game is really hard because no one ever talks about how your character in an RPG needs to be suited to the adventure. I can't tell you how many published adventures I've read where a quick scan reveals that the party is going to die if no one has a magic weapon or Neutralize Poison memorized.
Certainly, a better-designed game would handle this issue better, but most games just ignore it entirely by not addressing the issue. For fuck's sake, DnD doesn't even handle "running away," much less the complexities of running a social adventure despite people homebrewing those adventures for decades.
So the book makes suggestions like “You could do an intrigue campaign.” or “You could do The Count of Monte Cristo.” And that's the sort of thing that you really ought to be able to do. But while that is the sort of theme that characters who are on the side of the long banished demonic titans might be interested in, there's the not subtle issue that many of the characters this book creates are not going to be able to meaningfully bring their abilities to that kind of party.
Many of these suggested campaigns are about mixing with high society and talking a lot, and how the actual fuck are you supposed to do that as a Slayer of Malfeas whose every power is dedicated to hulking out and ripping people into pieces while presenting the visage of a terrifying demonic ogre? What does a Scourge of the Silent Wind bring to the party when they are presented with solid mechanical incentives to never ever speak?
I've literally watched eight-hour DnD sessions where people RPed a court ball. Trust me, no one used anything on their character sheet.
It isn't just that there are characters whose abilities and presented affects are a major liability in the kinds of deeply conversation driven narratives that the book is trying to sell you on with some of these campaign ideas. It's that none of these campaigns have any associated discussion about how to integrate the different kinds of characters presented in the book. The Crab Mummy is a fucking Crab Mummy. His power set is extremely weird, what kinds of stories can he be involved in where his abilities are in any way meaningful? He can make a glowing platform of psychic force and float around on it and torture people to the point of despair with telekinetic crushing. Those are really niche abilities that don't obviously fit into most stories you could imagine.
The chapter tells us that a full Coven is one character from each of the five Castes, but it makes no attempt at all to inform us about what roles these Castes might actually fill. We give D&D shit for making Fighters and Monks who aren't good enough at their jobs, but it is completely clear what their job actually is. There's an assumed set of stories, and an obvious set of means by which characters can contribute. D&D is a game about adventure serials, and characters contribute by overcoming challenges either by their own power or in conjunction with other characters. Shadowrun is a game about heists, and characters contribute through information gathering or overcoming one or more of the defenses of the target. What is The Infernals supposed to be about? What could a character built with these rules bring to the table where they might reasonably expect to be a contributing, story advancing protagonist. I have no idea. The authors of this book didn't think that was a question they needed to answer or even ask. And that's very weird, because it's literally like the first fucking question.
Inuyasha. It's about being Inuyasha from Inuyasha. Or a band of Inuyashas Inuyasha-ing across multiple planes of existence. Or one place. Or one Inuyasha with a lot of his girlfriends.
Happy now? It's an open-world setting. Make your own story.
You can make a story around any characters at all. There is, after all, They Fight Crime. But it's important to remember that first of all: They Fight Crime is a joke; and equally importantly that pretty much the entire game of They Fight Crime is thinking about how to go about making those improbable combinations work at all. But perhaps the most important thing of all is that They Fight Crime always has the characters do the same thing: Fight Crime, which is basically an Adventure Serial type setup not unlike Dungeons & Dragons.
In Dungeons & Dragons the characters are adventurers and they go on adventures. In Shadowrun, the characters are shadowrunners and they go on shadowruns. In Vampire the characters are vampires and they... vampire? I don't know. Vampire has a problem with story motivation and clarity. Exalted's problems are worse. I don't know what the characters are supposed to be, what they are supposed to do, or how any of this is supposed to work. Creating a story in this manner is like filling out a Madlibs, but Exalted never worked out what the spaces are supposed to be, let alone what the text in between is supposed to be like.
And this is like Vampire. You set the stage, add in some antagonists, then let the PCs make the story. Like Vampire, it won't make a lot of sense when you are done, but when has a soap opera ever had a coherent story?
The possible stories in this section run from "take a fundamental assumption of Exalted and act like the opposite was true" to "just figure it out and have some fun." I can live with that.
The thing you see when you read a lot of Exalted books is that none of the core assumptions are sacred. Each of the published adventures details possible end conditions that usually involve radically adjusting the core assumptions of the setting. That could be fun, or it could be madness. Ever game of Exalted rests on a light narrative framework with just enough rules to give the GM and players the courage to try to tell different stories.
Do a party with Dragonblooded, akuma, and Lunars? Who cares? Make the Yozi the secret heroes of the setting? Have fun. Bring demon-mecha to the dinner party for a dance-duel? Why are you asking permission? Have you seen the shit in this book? Kill the robot god and steal the secrets of Exaltation. Why did you wait so long?
There's a lot of objectionable things in this book. This chapter spends a good bit of time pointing out that the abuse and graphic violence and humiliation described elsewhere in this book is going to be something that is not going to sit particularly well with some potential players. And while it's somewhat admirable to come out and discuss the issue of people's limits in the context of a cooperative storytelling game – this book has gone way too far for way too long to be taken seriously. This is the classic Chutzpah of murdering your parents and then asking for clemency on the grounds that you are an orphan.
The thing is that “talking it over” is actually terrible advice in this instance. When we're talking about shit like pedo guro, even mentioning that shit is already way too far. This is the kind of horrors that takes pre-talking to get to the talking part. I am not going to have a conversation that begins “Would you like to tell a cooperative story that includes spider demons fornicating with an imprisoned child?” because that's fucked up and might get the cops called on me. This book is so far over the line that you really need tact to have the conversation about whether you should have the conversation about whether to include the more out-there atrocity-pornograpy elements. And in any case, the answer should obviously be “No.” Because fucking obviously.
"Mature content" RPing has never been a workable thing. I don't know why people try.
At best, this section is a suggestion that the player hit rock bottom and finally have their closest friends tell them that they are a disgusting piece of shit. At worst, it's a call to abuse people at the gaming table.
So yeh, this part isn't good.
Welcome to the book designed to poison the IP of Exalted so that someone could buy it for cheap.
Chapter Seven: Storytelling
Weird tortures in a ghastly abode of horrors? I'm so in!
Frank
My apologies for the lateness and weirdness of this chapter review. My entire portion of this chapter got completely swallowed by an auto-update triggered by my anti-virus. So rather than going section by section again, I'll be ranting about storytelling and relating it back to this chapter. You probably don't really care about the weird bit about trying to play a game set in the ancient past with the book about characters that literally did not exist before last Thursday anyway.
The chapter has 11 pages of text and is followed by an extra long comic. But nothing actually happens in that comic, so those 11 pages are the entire space this book has left itself to make the case that it is playable as a game in any context. Spoiler: it does not succeed.
K:
The comics are mood pieces. They are deliberately not stories, but just partial snapshots of events.
It's an adventure hook. I could write an adventure with just that little to inspire it, and it would look completely different from six other people's version of the same.
Frank
In a Dungeons & Dragons centered view of cooperative storytelling we often discuss how characters contribute to the story in terms of their ability to contribute to the group overcoming challenges. And that's because D&D is based on the adventure serial form of story as its central story to tell. There's no particular reason that you couldn't have a cooperative storytelling game where you told other kinds of stories and the contribution of characters wasn't measured in their ability to defuse a bomb or slay a manticore. You could be telling horror stories where a character's contribution to the story was to be overall likable in a way where it would be emotionally affecting when they got killed by the slasher. The sky's the limit. In an ensemble protagonist cooperative storytelling game, every character needs to have a contribution, but that contribution doesn't have to be a sword arm or an archer's aim, it just has to be something relevant to whatever stories you're actually telling.
One of the people writing this book thought that what we should be doing is making Greek Tragedies, where every character's contribution was their core personal failing that caused everything to end up disastrously wrong. Which is an out-there but totally reasonable goal. This book does not commit to this. Like, at all. The other authors and the editor apparently thought this was “totally insane” and we actually get a sidebar rebuttal to the concept that is no-shit entitled “I don't want to play a character who sucks.”
K:
This is actually pretty key. What we have here is an actual upgrade on the core thesis of Exalted where you play rockin' tacos godlings punching their way through stuff for fun and profit.
This section really does ask you to make a character with dramatic potential, but it accepts that some people are not ready for that. At the end of the day, you can only play an RPG with the players you've got, and some of them are not going to want to play a character with a complex inner life. Compromises are going to be made, and several parts of this chapter really do talk about the kinds of campaign that you might need to experiment with before you find a playable mix.
Frank
What stories can our Bondage Nun, Slayer, Crab Mummy, and Sex Ninja meaningfully contribute to together? I don't have an answer for that, and neither does the book. If a character has powers, you probably want those powers to impact on the story in some way. You could tell a story about paperwork problems in a meaningless middle class work environment with a character who could turn into a bat, but everyone would justifiably ask what the actual fuck you thought you were doing. The characters in Exalted have super powers. For various reasons they have less identifiable powers than they have Charms, but they still each have multiple powers that you'd expect to be pretty different one to another. What kind of story could accommodate characters with those disparate abilities in a way that wouldn't totally trivialize the abilities of one or more of them? What would that even look like?
We usually think of problems such as this in terms of balance. That you have situations like BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner; where the characters might broadly participate in the same kinds of adventures, but one character is clearly better at it than the other. One might justifiably ask why BMX Bandit is here at all, when he's basically not as good at crime fighting as even one of the angels that Angel Summoner brings as a six pack. But even then, you can imagine that there are goals like “saving civilians” and “fighting bad guys” that both BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner want to advance. BMX Bandit isn't contributing nearly as much as Angel Summoner, but they are both fighting on the same side, advancing the same goals, and generally contributing to the same story in complementary ways.
Exalted's problem is more one of concept. I don't really give a fuck whether the Bondage Nun or the Slayer is “better” than the other, because it's not at all obvious what stories you could tell where both ability sets would even come up. The characters might as well be Batman and the Koolaid Man.
K:
Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit is a fine parody of imbalance, but more than other games, Exalted at its core is about things being entirely imbalanced. The combat monster is supposed to tear through combats so that the diplomancer isn't supposed to have to. Each character should shine alone.
That means that the adventures have to be tailored to the talents of the characters. If someone fails to make a diplomancer, there are no courtly intrigue events. No combat monster, no duels or raids. No sorcerer character, then no sorcerer enemies.
Most RPGs have that assumption baked in less noticeably. For example, I once had a DnD 2e game where I wanted to play a Psionicist, but when I mentioned it my DM told everyone that if I did, he'd be forced to introduce psionic monsters and enemies…. As you can imagine, the party vetoed me. Character composition affects adventure choice.
I imagine that running an Exalted game is really hard because no one ever talks about how your character in an RPG needs to be suited to the adventure. I can't tell you how many published adventures I've read where a quick scan reveals that the party is going to die if no one has a magic weapon or Neutralize Poison memorized.
Certainly, a better-designed game would handle this issue better, but most games just ignore it entirely by not addressing the issue. For fuck's sake, DnD doesn't even handle "running away," much less the complexities of running a social adventure despite people homebrewing those adventures for decades.
Frank
So the book makes suggestions like “You could do an intrigue campaign.” or “You could do The Count of Monte Cristo.” And that's the sort of thing that you really ought to be able to do. But while that is the sort of theme that characters who are on the side of the long banished demonic titans might be interested in, there's the not subtle issue that many of the characters this book creates are not going to be able to meaningfully bring their abilities to that kind of party.
Many of these suggested campaigns are about mixing with high society and talking a lot, and how the actual fuck are you supposed to do that as a Slayer of Malfeas whose every power is dedicated to hulking out and ripping people into pieces while presenting the visage of a terrifying demonic ogre? What does a Scourge of the Silent Wind bring to the party when they are presented with solid mechanical incentives to never ever speak?
K:
I've literally watched eight-hour DnD sessions where people RPed a court ball. Trust me, no one used anything on their character sheet.
Frank
It isn't just that there are characters whose abilities and presented affects are a major liability in the kinds of deeply conversation driven narratives that the book is trying to sell you on with some of these campaign ideas. It's that none of these campaigns have any associated discussion about how to integrate the different kinds of characters presented in the book. The Crab Mummy is a fucking Crab Mummy. His power set is extremely weird, what kinds of stories can he be involved in where his abilities are in any way meaningful? He can make a glowing platform of psychic force and float around on it and torture people to the point of despair with telekinetic crushing. Those are really niche abilities that don't obviously fit into most stories you could imagine.
The chapter tells us that a full Coven is one character from each of the five Castes, but it makes no attempt at all to inform us about what roles these Castes might actually fill. We give D&D shit for making Fighters and Monks who aren't good enough at their jobs, but it is completely clear what their job actually is. There's an assumed set of stories, and an obvious set of means by which characters can contribute. D&D is a game about adventure serials, and characters contribute by overcoming challenges either by their own power or in conjunction with other characters. Shadowrun is a game about heists, and characters contribute through information gathering or overcoming one or more of the defenses of the target. What is The Infernals supposed to be about? What could a character built with these rules bring to the table where they might reasonably expect to be a contributing, story advancing protagonist. I have no idea. The authors of this book didn't think that was a question they needed to answer or even ask. And that's very weird, because it's literally like the first fucking question.
K:
Inuyasha. It's about being Inuyasha from Inuyasha. Or a band of Inuyashas Inuyasha-ing across multiple planes of existence. Or one place. Or one Inuyasha with a lot of his girlfriends.
Happy now? It's an open-world setting. Make your own story.
Frank
You can make a story around any characters at all. There is, after all, They Fight Crime. But it's important to remember that first of all: They Fight Crime is a joke; and equally importantly that pretty much the entire game of They Fight Crime is thinking about how to go about making those improbable combinations work at all. But perhaps the most important thing of all is that They Fight Crime always has the characters do the same thing: Fight Crime, which is basically an Adventure Serial type setup not unlike Dungeons & Dragons.
In Dungeons & Dragons the characters are adventurers and they go on adventures. In Shadowrun, the characters are shadowrunners and they go on shadowruns. In Vampire the characters are vampires and they... vampire? I don't know. Vampire has a problem with story motivation and clarity. Exalted's problems are worse. I don't know what the characters are supposed to be, what they are supposed to do, or how any of this is supposed to work. Creating a story in this manner is like filling out a Madlibs, but Exalted never worked out what the spaces are supposed to be, let alone what the text in between is supposed to be like.
K:
And this is like Vampire. You set the stage, add in some antagonists, then let the PCs make the story. Like Vampire, it won't make a lot of sense when you are done, but when has a soap opera ever had a coherent story?
The possible stories in this section run from "take a fundamental assumption of Exalted and act like the opposite was true" to "just figure it out and have some fun." I can live with that.
The thing you see when you read a lot of Exalted books is that none of the core assumptions are sacred. Each of the published adventures details possible end conditions that usually involve radically adjusting the core assumptions of the setting. That could be fun, or it could be madness. Ever game of Exalted rests on a light narrative framework with just enough rules to give the GM and players the courage to try to tell different stories.
Do a party with Dragonblooded, akuma, and Lunars? Who cares? Make the Yozi the secret heroes of the setting? Have fun. Bring demon-mecha to the dinner party for a dance-duel? Why are you asking permission? Have you seen the shit in this book? Kill the robot god and steal the secrets of Exaltation. Why did you wait so long?
Frank
There's a lot of objectionable things in this book. This chapter spends a good bit of time pointing out that the abuse and graphic violence and humiliation described elsewhere in this book is going to be something that is not going to sit particularly well with some potential players. And while it's somewhat admirable to come out and discuss the issue of people's limits in the context of a cooperative storytelling game – this book has gone way too far for way too long to be taken seriously. This is the classic Chutzpah of murdering your parents and then asking for clemency on the grounds that you are an orphan.
The thing is that “talking it over” is actually terrible advice in this instance. When we're talking about shit like pedo guro, even mentioning that shit is already way too far. This is the kind of horrors that takes pre-talking to get to the talking part. I am not going to have a conversation that begins “Would you like to tell a cooperative story that includes spider demons fornicating with an imprisoned child?” because that's fucked up and might get the cops called on me. This book is so far over the line that you really need tact to have the conversation about whether you should have the conversation about whether to include the more out-there atrocity-pornograpy elements. And in any case, the answer should obviously be “No.” Because fucking obviously.
K:
"Mature content" RPing has never been a workable thing. I don't know why people try.
At best, this section is a suggestion that the player hit rock bottom and finally have their closest friends tell them that they are a disgusting piece of shit. At worst, it's a call to abuse people at the gaming table.
So yeh, this part isn't good.
Welcome to the book designed to poison the IP of Exalted so that someone could buy it for cheap.
TIL: Holden has produced this abomination: https://holdenshearer.files.wordpress.c ... rkness.pdf
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Omegonthesane
- Prince
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If any part of that PDF was being used in the WoD/Exalted campaign I've previously mentioned, it wasn't admitted to the players.
...Actually looking at the 2018 copyright it can't have been even before we get into the utterly different base assumptions to support a single story instead of "sellotape things to a setting without regard to their fit"
...Actually looking at the 2018 copyright it can't have been even before we get into the utterly different base assumptions to support a single story instead of "sellotape things to a setting without regard to their fit"
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Mon Apr 08, 2019 8:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath, Justin Bieber, shitmuffin
Why do you hate the Japanese so much?FrankTrollman wrote:I am not going to have a conversation that begins “Would you like to tell a cooperative story that includes spider demons fornicating with an imprisoned child?” ... When we're talking about shit like pedo guro, even mentioning that shit is already way too far.
More seriously/unfortunately, many things about Japanese culture in general, and anime in particular, are just vile. Anytime you "anime-influence" any shared work of fiction, there is vapor pressure along the spectrum of makes-women-players-uncomfortable cheesecake to child-rape that needs to be actively held in check.
I recall that the fairfolk book also has... ravaging or something? ... some kind of debilitating mind rape that they would do to children; but, I don't think it was *explicitly* sexual in nature. I didn't read all (or even most) of their feeding rules, though. At the minimum, squick.
That's all well and good, until the players get into a dispute over the flower arrangements with the Red Countess, and who wins the etiquette challenge? If your answer is, "well you can roleplay it", then why have I bought your fucking game? If all you have on your character sheet is swordsage maneuvers...K wrote:I've literally watched eight-hour DnD sessions where people RPed a court ball. Trust me, no one used anything on their character sheet. ... It's an open-world setting. Make your own story.
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/11/03/topless-duel/
exception that proves the rule.
This whole line of argumentation (in defense of Exalted) strikes me as very lazy, and typical of defenses for bad games in general. Yeah, maybe it doesn't make any difference and we can all just have a tea party - so why the hell are we filling excel spreadsheets full of ki powers and jade swords and shit?
Vampire the Masquerade let people do this as vampires, and people cared a lot, even though the rules were awful and most aspects of the implementation were bad. Super-charisma (Presence), was both a power that people really wanted and also people managed to use it in game; it seems Exalted doesn't hit that formula successfully?
You only care about attending a masquerade ball as Exalted in so far as you can use the same characters in that soap opera as when you get bored and play high-level D&D. Persistence of your alter-ego between those play modes is a big deal, but no justification for the trainwreck that is Exalted, because Exalted doesn't seem to meaningfully support it! In particular, it is no excuse for having no prompts or support into the adventuring half of that equation, without which I have nothing invested in the alter-ego who is now going to a dinner party for 8 hours. That dinner party wants to fit into some larger plot or endeavor, which it can't do if I'm going spelunking for dragon gems and my co-conspirators at the party (the other PCs) don't even have skills relevant to joining the dungeon crawls I want to do.
A couple of questions, maybe best answered as part of the wrapup:
[*] If you subtract out the mountain of squick, how much is left that you might use in an actual game?
[*] If you are just throwing out the trainwreck of a rules set and do a hot demigod soap opera in not-Rokugan, is there anything useful for that?
[*] We've covered the worst of the book at length. What in it was the best or most evocative? On reflection, I kinda like the self-loathing green sun guy; he's more interesting than Sol Invictus, anyway.
Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
The first half of the book was written by a person thinking they are writing an evil bad guy antagonist book, so they were cranking all the evil up to eleven because this is exalted and "is a rapist" barely dips you into Neutral.DrPraetor wrote:More seriously/unfortunately, many things about Japanese culture in general, and anime in particular, are just vile. Anytime you "anime-influence" any shared work of fiction, there is vapor pressure along the spectrum of makes-women-players-uncomfortable cheesecake to child-rape that needs to be actively held in check.
The Excel sheets of jade swords and exhaustive and non-functional rules exist so that people give themselves permission to play Exalted.DrPraetor wrote:
This whole line of argumentation (in defense of Exalted) strikes me as very lazy, and typical of defenses for bad games in general. Yeah, maybe it doesn't make any difference and we can all just have a tea party - so why the hell are we filling excel spreadsheets full of ki powers and jade swords and shit?
Vampire has less rules because the ask is smaller. You know how to play a vampire because you've probably watched several dozen vampire movies within a narrow conceptual space and conceptually you've got a good idea of vampire-ness.
Exalted is harder. The mechanical bits are there to fire the imagination rather than to execute commands in a logical machine. The average player balks at the idea of even trying to play a living avatar of divine excellence, so you need to narrow the focus down to picking Charms and fiddling with dice pools because otherwise it seems impossible. The rules are there to give you the illusion that they will create the desired effect when your imagination fails.
Mechanically, Exalted is as badly designed as Vampire. Any defense or criticism of one applies to the other, and if you ever had fun playing one then you can have fun playing the other. If you bought one because the setting sounded cool, then you can understand why someone else would do the same.
All RPGs involve some mind-caulk. The better the rules and more fascinating the setting, the longer that mind-caulk lasts before you have to move on to the next game.
Last edited by K on Mon Apr 08, 2019 11:54 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Username17
- Serious Badass
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I would say that roughly 20% of this book is worth reading and discussing from the perspective of game design and setting design. There are five authors, and I feel that one of them had some interesting ideas about how to improve the setting and game from a playability standpoint. Of the remaining four authors, two of them are just doing paint-by-numbers Exalted crap that is exactly as worthless as anything else made during the twilight era of the White Wolf late aughts shovelware period. And the last two people were just trying to offend the reader by going more edgelord than other White Wolf products.DrPraetor wrote:If you subtract out the mountain of squick, how much is left that you might use in an actual game?
But while I think that the idea of having your dice pools be tied to your ability to narratively tie the current situation to the legendary stories of setting characters is interesting, I would not say it's sufficiently fleshed out to be really playable in this book as-is. One of the people had a vision for a really different and much more free-form game, and if someone else hadn't constantly been riveting that idea back onto the unworkable skeleton of Exalted, that might have gone somewhere. But instead this book has like one person asking "Wouldn't this be better if we..." and then four other voices rear up and say "Shut up! I don't want to play a character who sucks!" It's kind of tragic, because only the guy who was trying to make a game about creating epic tragedies with semi-competitive Scheherazade as the primary conflict resolution mechanic is in any way worth reading. And he would have needed a numbers guy. which White Wolf conspicuously did not have in 2009.
Nah, Exalted is worse. It's tempting to say that Vampire plays smoother just because of the fact that the World of Darkness is low fantasy - that most of the world is our world and that you can look outside or look on Wikipedia to fill in setting elements not expounded upon in the books. And that does help. A lot. But Exalted also has all those layers of Perfect Attacks and Perfect Defenses and Excellencies and shit. And those legitimately make the game worse mechanically in addition to having a setting that is less accessible narratively.K wrote:Mechanically, Exalted is as badly designed as Vampire.
More broadly, Vampire's core mechanic of rolling a modest pile of dice and then doing some viscera reading to determine how well you performed an action is only vaguely passable when actions are within the reach of competent humans. What happens when people get superhumn results on Manipulation or Larceny checks is really anyone's guess. Which isn't a huge problem in Vampire, because mostly players are stuck with 10 dice or less and have specific magic powers that do specific things rather than performing superheroic actions by dint of getting superhuman die results on basic tasks. In Exalted, most characters have significantly super-human dicepools in their areas of expertise and that failure point of the system is trotted out for display immediately and constantly.
Exalted's call for constant superheroic stunts combined with the fact that the core mechanics really don't let you extrapolate what characters are capable of if they significantly exceed the capabilities of normal humans is a real ball ache all the time. It's the old AD&D problem of "what does it mean to have a Wisdom of 21?" except for some stupid reason you've given virtually everyone a Wisdom of 21 or its equivalent. So instead of being a fringe failure point of the rules, it's a core failure point of the rules.
-Username17
I don't really feel that it takes more mind-caulk to decide what three successes vs five on an Investigation roll in Vampire means as opposed to ten in Exalted. I'm still using my feeling-thoughts as a bad game mechanic.FrankTrollman wrote:Nah, Exalted is worse. It's tempting to say that Vampire plays smoother just because of the fact that the World of Darkness is low fantasy - that most of the world is our world and that you can look outside or look on Wikipedia to fill in setting elements not expounded upon in the books. And that does help. A lot. But Exalted also has all those layers of Perfect Attacks and Perfect Defenses and Excellencies and shit. And those legitimately make the game worse mechanically in addition to having a setting that is less accessible narratively.K wrote:Mechanically, Exalted is as badly designed as Vampire.
More broadly, Vampire's core mechanic of rolling a modest pile of dice and then doing some viscera reading to determine how well you performed an action is only vaguely passable when actions are within the reach of competent humans. What happens when people get superhumn results on Manipulation or Larceny checks is really anyone's guess. Which isn't a huge problem in Vampire, because mostly players are stuck with 10 dice or less and have specific magic powers that do specific things rather than performing superheroic actions by dint of getting superhuman die results on basic tasks. In Exalted, most characters have significantly super-human dicepools in their areas of expertise and that failure point of the system is trotted out for display immediately and constantly.
Exalted's call for constant superheroic stunts combined with the fact that the core mechanics really don't let you extrapolate what characters are capable of if they significantly exceed the capabilities of normal humans is a real ball ache all the time. It's the old AD&D problem of "what does it mean to have a Wisdom of 21?" except for some stupid reason you've given virtually everyone a Wisdom of 21 or its equivalent. So instead of being a fringe failure point of the rules, it's a core failure point of the rules.
-Username17
Like Vampire, Exalted does most of its interesting things through discrete powers (Charms vs Disciplines). The downside is that there are far too many Charms and they overlap, but to some people that feels like choice. It's not like Vampire didn't have overlap with things like six different kinds of Thaumaturgy that did very similar things (Thaumaturgy, Dark Thaum., Assamite, Setite, Koldunic, Necromancy).
Exalted is worse than Vampire because every single one of its mechanics is dysfunctional. Literally, anything you can bring Exalted mechanics in for makes your session worse than just MTPing it. Unlike Vampire where it's only mostly the case. At least in Vampire you can make a social check without the game exploding. In Exalted "Social Combat" is so absurd that the only reasonable response to people having a bigger social dicepool with you is drawing your weapon and either attacking or running away. The combat is far worse than Vampire too.
And the setting is worse. At least in Vampire you have a vampire society to interact with. In Exalted everyone is either an enemy or a mind-controlled slave.
And the setting is worse. At least in Vampire you have a vampire society to interact with. In Exalted everyone is either an enemy or a mind-controlled slave.
That’s a simplification that’s only true if you don’t have social Charms, won’t stunt or spend Willpower or channel a Virtue, and are too cowardly to roll off against someone with more dice.Longes wrote:Exalted is worse than Vampire because every single one of its mechanics is dysfunctional. Literally, anything you can bring Exalted mechanics in for makes your session worse than just MTPing it. Unlike Vampire where it's only mostly the case. At least in Vampire you can make a social check without the game exploding. In Exalted "Social Combat" is so absurd that the only reasonable response to people having a bigger social dicepool with you is drawing your weapon and either attacking or running away. The combat is far worse than Vampire too.
So yes, at a mini-game where you are terrible, you have limited options. I’d honestly love to hear what you think should be the ideal. Should your PC be secretly good at something they have chosen to be bad at?
I’ve played many vampire games where all the vampires and other supernaturals are enemies and all humans the PCs interact with are slaves or food. Honestly, a lot of DnD is played that way.And the setting is worse. At least in Vampire you have a vampire society to interact with. In Exalted everyone is either an enemy or a mind-controlled slave.
I’m curious why you think everyone in Exalted is an enemy. What do the gods or the Lunars have against the Solars? The Fallen Races? Half the Sidereals are explicitly some kind of allies, and Lost Egg Dragonblooded have no allegiances but to their local nation. Clearly the Empire’s Dragonblooded and the Immaculate Order are generally enemies along with the Abyssals and Infernals, but there is nothing hardcoded in the setting that says you can’t interact with each other as not-enemies sometimes. The Direction books even have several instances where it says that particular nations are OK with Solars.
When the penalty for losing is that you become somebody else's mindslave, then it's not a mini-game, it's a big game and one where you can nor even should be allowed to be bad at.K wrote:That’s a simplification that’s only true if you don’t have social Charms, won’t stunt or spend Willpower or channel a Virtue, and are too cowardly to roll off against someone with more dice.Longes wrote:Exalted is worse than Vampire because every single one of its mechanics is dysfunctional. Literally, anything you can bring Exalted mechanics in for makes your session worse than just MTPing it. Unlike Vampire where it's only mostly the case. At least in Vampire you can make a social check without the game exploding. In Exalted "Social Combat" is so absurd that the only reasonable response to people having a bigger social dicepool with you is drawing your weapon and either attacking or running away. The combat is far worse than Vampire too.
So yes, at a mini-game where you are terrible, you have limited options. I’d honestly love to hear what you think should be the ideal. Should your PC be secretly good at something they have chosen to be bad at?
FrankTrollman wrote: Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.