Worst and/or Weirdest Exalted Moment...

[Lago PARANOIA]

So, TGD people, what was your first 'what the fuck is wrong with this fucked-up game?!' moment?

You guys already know my moment. It was the nude loli in a fursuit in the 2nd Ed book that I didn't even realize was there until after I purchased the game and left the book out in berthing.

There's something to be said about a game that makes you an instant pariah among other total fucking nerds and I had to sneak out of the ship under cover of darkness.

[Koumei]

I'm sure "What is everyone's worst Exalted moment?" could have its own thread, what with that being a very far-reaching thing. There are so many contenders, I wouldn't want the point of this thread to be drowned out. The one that made that article end would probably be what I consider the worst thing, but I honestly can't remember what the first "what the fuck is this shit?" moment was.

Anyway, the reason why it's not simply "Avatar: the Last RPG" is probably in part because I haven't watched TLA or Korra, and especially not the delightful live action movie. Also, I like the idea of people gaining their power from different major sources and that playing a part in how they look, what they're supposed to be doing and so on.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You're right. It should be a separate thread. fbmf, could you do the honors?

[Josh_Kablack]

So, TGD people, what was your first 'what the fuck is wrong with this fucked-up game?!' moment?

Reading the mired rules during 1e playtesting and getting laughed at by the devs for daring to be critical of "Mud beats all charms" as a design decision in a game that's supposed to be high powered.

[RadiantPhoenix]

"Mud beats all charms"

Huh?

Please explain this, I feel like I have no idea what you're talking about.

[Username17]

Exalted didn't catch my fancy when it came out. It was shortly after 3e came out, and they were pimping it with their big "Only losers play D&D anymore!" message, and that was simply the wrong foot to lead off with in 2001. D&D was cool again, and White Wolf was pretty severely played out. They were just flailing around with their World of Darkness stuff, and pretty much everyone agreed that things had gotten "too crazy" and shit needed a reboot. Having White Wolf lecture me about how young and hip they were and how no one needed old worn-out D&D anymore was like Mitt Romney trying to win over my vote with his mad basketball skills.

So I didn't even really pick up an Exalted book until several years had passed. I think we were just about getting into 3.5 D&D, which offended me enough that I was willing to see what White Wolf had been up to. By that time, they had already come out with all kinds of crazy bullshit. Just the fact that their extra character types were "available for play", but "Lol no, you can't actually play them together, n00b!" was putting me deeply in the skeptical column.

So even a casual read-through made it clear that this game was a game that had... mechanical issues and would have to be tinkered with a lot to make it get off the ground. And then I had my Exalted playing friends explain what the fuck was supposed to be going on. And I was like...







And then I never played it. Because holy fuck man, what the actual fuck?

I gave White Wolf another chance when they did their big nWoD reboot. That was also a mistake.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Bear in mind that the passage I quote here was softened from the playtest version after I kicked and screamed a whole lot.

Water or Mud: Characters fighting in mud or water of less than ankle depth suffer no penalties, though the Storyteller should keep the conditions in mind when determining the effects and severity of botches.

So far so good. Moving along

Characters fighting in water of up to knee depth and mud of up to mid-calf depth suffer a -1 penalty to all rolls. Characters fighting in water of up to waist depth or mud of up to knee depth suffer a -2 to their dice pools

That might look reasonable at first, but in a game about high powered fantasy, tracking the difference between "knee" and "mid-calf" requires a Mearlsian levels of obsession with pointless minitaue.

I'll leave it to someone who has touched these rules since playtest to puzzle out if those penalties "to all rolls" or "to their dice pools" penalizes perception and intimidation and other non-footing related combat tasks or not.

But where I remember kicking and screaming was this next part:

Characters in water of greater than waist depth or mud of greater than knee depth may still make ranged attacks but can only wrestle in hand-to-hand combat

Thus mud invalidates the use of most Brawl, Melee and Martial Arts charm trees as well as the use of any sort of blade. That's really really contradictory to the notion of high-powered fantasy combat and excludes Ogami Itto's Wave Slicing Stroke from being a potential move.

[Dean]

I played in an Exalted game once when the cute girl in my local gaming store started one. I played a Solar at everyone's suggestion because they didn't have one yet. I was going to show up as a pirate in the party's second session and join them so I made a character who was a leader of men. I invested a bunch of resources in having a village and an army. After I met the party at sea we did a group spar session which due to me being a Solar and having good system mastery I was winning. Until in the last round the party asshole, who had decided to not join in the combat, showed me that in Exalted you can fuck with the initiative system SUPER bad and it cannot handle it. Apparently in Exalted if you wait till after someone's turn they can't use their response charms or something like that so he declared he was joining the fight, walked in, hit me once without me being able to activate any defenses, drew his sword (which changes your initiative massively in Exalted for no good fucking reason) then now being at the top of the initiative order he took his next turn to walk away from combat and declare he was uninterested.

So fuck that guy all day.

Then when we finished the boat ride back to my village Cute DM declared it had been burnt to the ground, along with my forces. So there goes my whole character background. Up in smoke like so much village. Apparently their were abyssals around and this was a message, or something. So then we sailed around on a boat and sold fish or something for a few days. I noticed that since I didn't have any social charms party members kept pointing out that people should give me shit, which they did. That would go on for a while until some combat would occur somewhere and then I would fucking kill everyone because Solar. This led to it being weirder and weirder that townsfolk were constantly talking shit to me and made most of my conversations some variant of "Why are you all shoving me!? I killed a different gang here yesterday in front of this very fucking store! Do none of you know fear!?".

Then a kid showed up and said she was from my village, and her family had been killed and she needed help. I told her I'd protect her and then thunder and lightning happened because apparently the little girl was an Abyssal, and they have some power where they can make some contract you agree to magically binding. And apparently my statement that I'd protect her was being counted as a contract now, and was divinely binding. Because fuck me.

So before long I stopped showing up to that game. Obviously. That cute girl was terrible to have at the head of a gaming table but luckily was pretty good at giving actual head. In the three weeks of gaming we started fucking which pretty much made the experience nuetral on the whole. This is the core of all White Wolf games. They have offensive fluff and unplayable mechanics but if you play them you can fuck theatre girls. All in all this has made them one of the top RPG companies in the world.

[Avoraciopoctules]

My main initial exposure to Exalted came from reading jokes people wrote about how terrible it was in various regards. After a few years, I read a couple of surprisingly decent webcomics set in a somewhat modified Exalted setting. That got me a little curious but not enough to actually look at the books. I worked a few ideas into some of my subsequent games and game designs, but kept several degrees of separation. The closest I came to what I thought of as Exalted was a postapocalyptic fantasy game where the PCs were soulless revenants a necromancer had made using the bodies of dead heroes, destined to come into conflict with the demons their old souls had been transformed into once they made enough progress defending civilization from jade elementals and shadowblight zombie hordes.

Then I heard there was a new version of Exalted coming out. Ostensibly, the dev team recognized that the old game had serious problems, and they were going to address them. People on the Something Awful forums seemed pretty optimistic, and I considered backing the kickstarter.

A few weeks later, I read a very entertaining SA article about the grisly history of the Exalted brand, and tuned into the forums to discover I'd missed a controversy over the latest preview including some pretty offensive powers where you summoned rape-zombies to turn people into more rape-zombies. Not a good sign at all, especially when the dev team's attempts to defend their creation ended up looking both inept and deceptive.

I feel pretty good about never reading an Exalted book right now. Before the SA article, my thoughts were basically "ha, this sounds mediocre-to-bad with a few interesting ideas". Now, I'm more like "Damn, this is just horrible."

[fectin]

@ Dean,
All of the criticisms you had are fair, but nothing you described is even similar to how Exalted works mechanically.

@ Josh,
That's pretty stupid, yeah. I'm pretty sure 2E fixed it though.

[fectin]

Oh, actually, I've got one: for the longest time, I didn't realize that stunting awarded willpower and/or motes. I think I went a whole campaign without realizing, and when I ran my own campaign, that was part of the houserules.

I can't imagine the slogfest it would be if you included that in fights.

[Lago PARANOIA]

This is the core of all White Wolf games. They have offensive fluff and unplayable mechanics but if you play them you can fuck theatre girls. All in all this has made them one of the top RPG companies in the world.

You know, you're not the first or even the third person who has said something similar to this. Off of the top of my head, this has been the experience of my brother, two guys in my old division, and some classmate that dropped out of the EE program.

[Archmage Joda]

Then I heard there was a new version of Exalted coming out. Ostensibly, the dev team recognized that the old game had serious problems, and they were going to address them. People on the Something Awful forums seemed pretty optimistic, and I considered backing the kickstarter.

A few weeks later, I read a very entertaining SA article about the grisly history of the Exalted brand, and tuned into the forums to discover I'd missed a controversy over the latest preview including some pretty offensive powers where you summoned rape-zombies to turn people into more rape-zombies. Not a good sign at all, especially when the dev team's attempts to defend their creation ended up looking both inept and deceptive.

I feel pretty good about never reading an Exalted book right now. Before the SA article, my thoughts were basically "ha, this sounds mediocre-to-bad with a few interesting ideas". Now, I'm more like "Damn, this is just horrible."

Wait, wait, what? I haven't really been following much anything about Exalted 3e because I got tired of not seeing anything to entice me to give a fourth of a crap about it, so now I gotta ask, what?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Wait, wait, what? I haven't really been following much anything about Exalted 3e because I got tired of not seeing anything to entice me to give a fourth of a crap about it, so now I gotta ask, what?

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/dungeon ... php?page=1

[Koumei]

Wait, the game encourages mud wrestling? Though I cannot in any way approve of it denying water-splitting swordsmanship and such.

As for the mote/WP gain from stunts, I saw it but didn't like it. I feel it'd be better for stunts to do the following:
[*]Bonus dice as listed, but so you don't get the "Shirt Guy Dom" experience, it should have some kind of "if you deliberately waffle on and bore everyone else, you lose it" stipulation.
[*]In lieu of the above, you can use multiple Charms.
So instead of spending XP/BP to develop a combo, then spending WP to activate it (and stunting to get the WP back), you just stunt to activate a Charm. And still spend your motes and not get them back from the stunt. No bonus dice for doing this.

Anyhow, I think I do remember the first thing that made me go "urk". The bit about Lunars creating half-castes through bestiality. But while I didn't like it, World of Darkness already had that so it didn't exactly surprise me.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I heard 3e removed motes from stunts and just gives players a mote regeneration rate.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

A guy in my old group wanted to play Exalted, I don't know what edition but this was around '04. I don't know what happened afterwards except that he revoked the offer a few weeks later claiming that no-one had shown any interest in it. This was after I had bought a copy of the main rulebook for that specific campaign, so yeah whatever. That said, I remember pretty much nothing from reading that book, and sold it off with a bunch of other books when I moved to Washington State.

It's just as well, I never really liked the over all design of things in the book, it was mostly pretty bland generic sword-and-sandal fantasy with heavy manga influence, as I recall, and it resulted in people wielding things that were the size and shape of sharpened airplane wings, which I couldn't take seriously.

[Username17]

Exalted, 2nd edition came out in 2006 and had a group photo on the front. Exalted, 1st edition came out in 2001 and had the archer lady on the front.

In the original book in 2001, they basically say "You play Solars!" Over the next couple of years, they tried to soften that stance and made additional playable character types with much fanfare, but couldn't be fucked to get the different types playing remotely the same game.

If you were looking into it in 2004, you were basically in edition 1.5. The original 1e stuff about you playing Solars had been jettisoned, but the actual 2nd edition wouldn't come out for another 2 years. Of course, this was also the point where White Wolf was doing nWoD, and all the fail that entailed. So I assume that the Exalted materials of this period were comparably terrible.

-Username17

[Archmage Joda]

Wait, wait, what? I haven't really been following much anything about Exalted 3e because I got tired of not seeing anything to entice me to give a fourth of a crap about it, so now I gotta ask, what?

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/dungeon ... php?page=1

I...I'm flabbergasted. Honestly. Why in the nine hells would someone think that what the game needs is powers specifically tailored to turning people into sex slave ghosts? More than that, why would that be one of the rare tidbits of information given about the game as it's developed?

And the corresponding thread responding to that "incident" over on the white wolf forums. The prevailing attitude, as far as I can see, is in defense of such nuttery. Am I being oversensitive about it? Am I reading too much into people's attitudes on the other end? My brain is full of fuck!

[Username17]

Am I being oversensitive about it? Am I reading too much into people's attitudes on the other end? My brain is full of fuck!

Not really, no. White Wolf has always played a dangerous game with transgression, where they do things that are offensive for the purpose of drumming up attention. Their track record of choosing things to offend with that are ultimately harmless over picking things that are legitimately horrible are not particularly good. And let's be real clear: their fanbase cannot tell the difference. For fuck's sake, on this board we had White Wolf fans defending dog rape as a lifestyle choice. Without irony.

It's kind of like TVTropes. Once you've committed yourself to being hugboxy about deviancy of "all kinds", it's apparently difficult to notice that you've actually stepped way the fuck over the line. Even when you are, for example, encouraging your contributors to tell stories about having committed statutory rape on their IRL family members (I wish this was an exaggeration, but in TVT's case, it is not).

White Wolf hasn't actually internalized that glorifying actual rape is not OK. Their fans certainly haven't figured that out either. And yes: it's really pretty gross. Actually fuck, it's very gross. And it tarnishes the entire hobby. Drawing equivalencies between rape and homosexuality is actually just as offensive when the rape apologists do it as when the homophobes do it.

Now, White Wolf is still a major step ahead of TVTropes, because they are merely telling fictional stories about raping fictional children. Which means that they have all the protection of the First Amendment and are merely showing that they are horrible people. As opposed to the people writing Troper Tales on the Incest pages, who were of course making credible threats to sexually violate real life children and need to have their IP addresses given to the FBI. So they haven't actually crossed the line of what is legal or allowed. But they are still far beyond any possible boundaries of good taste, and they should be publicly shunned.

-Username17

[Avoraciopoctules]

@Archmage Joda
Don't worry, there are plenty of offended people on other forums. It's had a noticeable impact on the kickstarter pledges.

[DSMatticus]

I'm offended more at their stupidity than the concept. Not to say the concept of "I throw rape ghosts at it" isn't on the offensive side of things, but I don't think anyone misunderstands that succubi get charm monster and suggestion because "they have sexy demon boobs," and that their energy drain also triggering off a kiss is because it lets you stop short of the remarkably awkward and uncomfortable sentence "the succubi makes you fuck her to death (your's, not her's)." But succubi are totally magic date rapists. That's the whole shtick. And while they are already suuuper awkward, they would be a lot more (noticeably) offensive if they didn't have 1) boobs and 2) alternative table descriptions that can keep them in the PG-13 range.

And considering that Exalted, like most White Wolf products, is half power fantasy and half sexual fetishes, it's not particularly surprising that magic date rapists show up, because, well... White Wolf. But at the same time, putting in some breakpoints that are consistent with the general theme "you do sexy (fingerquotes) things to people that are actually quite bad for their health possibly against their will" that stop short of full-blown "so while Bob is raping Alice, what do you do for your turn, Clark?" is pretty important, because people have to sit down and play this game and hopefully be able to look at eachother during and after.

Just because someone wants to play a magic date rapist doesn't mean you have to go and make it all weird, right?

[Atmo]

"so while Bob is raping Alice, what do you do for your turn, Clark?"

That kinda happened/happens on some of my games, because i let people do crazyass things and the like.

Yep, we play online and no one knows each other on real life. That works wonders.

[Voss]

I'm offended more at their stupidity than the concept. Not to say the concept of "I throw rape ghosts at it" isn't on the offensive side of things, but I don't think anyone misunderstands that succubi get charm monster and suggestion because "they have sexy demon boobs," and that their energy drain also triggering off a kiss is because it lets you stop short of the remarkably awkward and uncomfortable sentence "the succubi makes you fuck her to death (your's, not her's)." But succubi are totally magic date rapists. That's the whole shtick. And while they are already suuuper awkward, they would be a lot more (noticeably) offensive if they didn't have 1) boobs and 2) alternative table descriptions that can keep them in the PG-13 range.

The set up is also part of it. While it of course doesn't always happen this way (and people can and do go to fucked up places with it), the point of the succubus in D&D is to get stabbed in the face because it is an evil creature. (which is really simplistic, but whatever. At least it doesn't go into nauseasting detail)

The implicit point isn't to get off on sadistic power fantasies, as it is with White Wolf, or apparently, this Atmo fellow.

[John Magnum]

Frank, can you elaborate on these TVT events? I've known that Troper Tales has really embarrassingly juvenile stuff where people post how all these "misunderstood genius" "sarcastic because he knows how stupid everything is" etc. tropes apply to them, but I didn't know that there were actually people advocating real-life sexual harassment. Exactly what kind of rape apology is going on over there?