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I feel like a lot of that stuff comes from not sufficiently examining what happens when you ask a player to identify deeply with the character they built over a long period of time for a campaign. Most players will, in my experience, either protagonize their character and start making them more decent, or explain away their behavior. Because most people deep down don't really like playing brutal shitlords, much as they talk about a desire to play deep tragedy. Most people long-term are not that down with 'I'm playing the doomed hubristic warrior king whose self-obsession and curse will make it so it would have been better if I hadn't been there'. That works in a short, focused game much more than it does in a game with long-run campaigns played as the same PC.
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Mar 20, 2019 21:55
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In a way I am surprised Ayn Rand or just Atlas Shrugged haven't shown up on the suggested fiction section for Exalted. The part I always hated about The Great Curse for Solars is that it felt forced and ultimately removed control from the player.
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Mar 20, 2019 22:05
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Oh yeah! I forgot about the whole Judges thing. Which... I mean, okay. Exalted is going for the Ancient Heroes thing and it's good to add something into the mix that isn't Achilles being a fucker. But then they suggest it right next to Conan and Game of Thrones, and it's clear they have no idea what Exalted is.
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Mar 20, 2019 22:07
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How did I miss that completely insane Book of Judges listing. I was too focused on marveling at Inuyasha and FFVII.
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Mar 20, 2019 22:14
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Tibalt posted:But then they suggest it right next to Conan and Game of Thrones, and it's clear they have no idea what Exalted is. Or they feel that the system can do all of those various themes and moods. Which feels like muddying the water a helluva lot when they don't seem to have a core theme running and just want you to bounce between them.
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Mar 20, 2019 22:17
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Don’t most people end up running it more like Inuyasha than tragic heroes anyway?
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Mar 20, 2019 22:27
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Yeah, that's what I was saying: People tend to make their characters into cool anime heroes or wuxia protagonists instead because it's more fun to play and the trappings are RIGHT THERE.
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Mar 20, 2019 22:30
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I've had at least a dozen players try and create Gilgamesh in Exalted. Every single one of them was referring to the Fate Stay Night Gilgamesh, not the mythological one.
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Mar 20, 2019 22:35
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Cooked Auto posted:The part I always hated about The Great Curse for Solars is that it felt forced and ultimately removed control from the player. I maintain that Exalted's backstory instantly becomes much more interesting and much stronger thematically if you just remove the Great Curse wholesale. Why did the Solars turn into decadent, psychopathic tyrants? Because they're loving people, and people (especially people with huge egos and unchecked power) do that poo poo at the drop of a loving hat. I enjoyed playing Exalted 2 but man is it a love-hate relationship. I noped out of 3rd ed. as soon as I heard about That One Thing, You Know The One I Mean, so I'm interested to hear if it got better later.
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Mar 20, 2019 22:56
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My favorite take on the Great Curse is the 3e DB one. They're keeping Limit for the Celestials for...I don't know why, but DBs just get bonus XP when they do something that is elementally themed, dickish and entertaining.
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Mar 20, 2019 23:01
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Exalted is the king of the era of games before about 3e where every game had really bad rules and had a bloated setting in a less fun way than the weird crank authors breaking out their eccentric worldbuilding project. It’s a shame that 3e was also terrible like all the returning games from the era except Torg.
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Mar 20, 2019 23:03
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3e is overall good, actually. And now that it's in the hands of people who are both decent and not driven primarily by weird hangups, it should only improve over time. E: While I agree that the 'grim and gritty' stuff is obnoxious, I don't remember that much of it in the Ex3 Core. What I remember a lot of, and I will begrudgingly say this was something the prior devs specifically stated an interest in (though Minton and Vance had been doing it longer, and better, as freelancers) was focusing on smaller-scale, even mortal-scale texture in Creation. There's a ton of plot hooks that don't tie in to Yu Shan, Malfeas, or even the Realm throughout the book, and locations are presented that have their own depth and interesting texture that ultimately have nothing to do with the Exalted Host as a general concept. They're just there to be run into, and possibly used by, players. Since what I find compelling in Creation is the setting (as well as liking the 3e core combat and social systems), I'm happy with that. Solar charms being kinda bloated is definitely a problem, but I have found Ex3 easier to use than Ex2, especially since I don't need to cross-reference tons of errata or keep an eye out for actually broken charms as much (maybe I just haven't identified them in play). Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Mar 20, 2019 |
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Mar 20, 2019 23:08
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Mors Rattus posted:My favorite take on the Great Curse is the 3e DB one. They're keeping Limit for the Celestials for...I don't know why, but DBs just get bonus XP when they do something that is elementally themed, dickish and entertaining. That is pretty thematically accurate for the DB's as I remember it. So good on them for that. But yeah, never liked Celestial Limit Break but then I also have a hard time agreeing to anything that forces stuff on the players. megane posted:I enjoyed playing Exalted 2 but man is it a love-hate relationship. Yeah same here.
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Mar 20, 2019 23:13
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I'll be the first one to cop having played Exalted and not even KNOWING what the Great Curse is because we didn't bother with it in our short-lived game Though I guess I did enter via the FF7 link because someone said "you can have a buster sword called a daiklave in this and you can slot materia in it too" and I was like "awesome!!" at age 13
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Mar 20, 2019 23:14
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Joe Slowboat posted:3e is overall good, actually. Even with the new stewardship, the foundation is rotten. They did as great a job as they could with DB's but holy poo poo it's even more bloated and sprawling than the Solar Charm set, and parts of it have to squeeze into the tiny space between "just outright sucks" and the lower-tier Solar Charms where a significant proportion of the presumed target audience has to pretend to care about rerolling 6's.
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Mar 20, 2019 23:18
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The value of the Great Curse, which I feel can and should be removed at any table that doesn't want it, is to state 'no, you may not declare your Solar immune to hubris.' I have found, in STing Exalted, that the actual mechanical intrusion of the Great Curse happened rarely unless the ST was gunning for it, but having a definite sense of 'this is how my character tends towards tragic heroism' was useful. It's just also the case that 2e's Curse mechanics were hot garbage and you could accidentally take a Curse that would just ruin the entire game, like Berserk Anger, which is Hercules killing his family. Only it's a PC, flipping out and possibly murdering all the NPCs/even PCs around them. So the mechanical implementation of the Curse made an already complicated question of 'how do we try to propagate a theme, tragic heroism, which players will tend to shy away from?' a lot worse. e: I think I may just try to bow out of this topic; I clearly have a really different experience with Ex3 mechanics than others here, and I don't want to claim I have a more correct opinion, nor do I want to try to argue about how bloated/complex/complete a charmset should be. If I do find myself staggering back in on this like an idiot, please remind me I said this and I'll take the L. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Mar 20, 2019 |
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Mar 20, 2019 23:22
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3872282 Also, if people are interested in colorful 17th century clothing and stuff, the MilHist thread in Ask-Tell is actually both pretty good on that subject and discussing it right now. There are people there who would be delighted by questions about how fancy of hats Landschneckts had.
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Mar 20, 2019 23:28
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That Old Tree posted:Even with the new stewardship, the foundation is rotten. They did as great a job as they could with DB's but holy poo poo it's even more bloated and sprawling than the Solar Charm set, and parts of it have to squeeze into the tiny space between "just outright sucks" and the lower-tier Solar Charms where a significant proportion of the presumed target audience has to pretend to care about rerolling 6's. I disagree strongly about it being more bloated and sprawling than the Solars, largely because I can read and enjoy the DB Charms by and large and I find many of the Solar ones nearly impossible to parse when they aren't hella boring. E: I don't disagree that the foundation of 'Solar Charms represent the upper bound and no DB can ever approach this' does limit them unduly, though
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Mar 20, 2019 23:38
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My group did a lot with the Curse, and we liked it mostly because of the possibility of overcoming it and then finding out, no, you didn't cure yourself of irrational humanity. But that's an incredibly specific meta approach, and the books have always spent way too much time on haphazard punishment mechanics and no Storyteller guidance. Even back in 04 we were houseruling it so it was more like an actual human overreaction than "a guard threatened my friend and now I have to divest all worldly goods." The mechanics have always been pretty lovely, even by Exalted's standards.Mors Rattus posted:I disagree strongly about it being more bloated and sprawling than the Solars, largely because I can read and enjoy the DB Charms by and large and I find many of the Solar ones nearly impossible to parse when they aren't hella boring. I'm probably biased by the layout, which I think is terrible. The Charms are already very large, and they seem cramped, there're broken columns loving everywhere, and the headers aren't great (also a legacy of the core book). I don't have the energy and love to get over the formatting.
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Mar 20, 2019 23:52
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...what layout, it's a manuscript e: like, yeah, the DB and Lunar manuscript previews are ugly, but...manuscript previews Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Mar 21, 2019 |
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Mar 20, 2019 23:57
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Mors Rattus posted:...what layout, it's a manuscript The PDF my friends showed me looks pretty complete. 
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Mar 21, 2019 00:08
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I honestly kind of hate the very idea of the Solars. Here are people who are just better than everyone else, just because that's their destiny.
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Mar 21, 2019 00:09
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yeah, i have some Thoughts about Solars. Exalted in general is very much about people who are Just Better Than Normal People, but Solars exemplify it the most. But just wait until tomorrow when i post the stuff that the game gives as the capsule summary of Solar thematics. spoilers: the game doesn't have many ideas besides Solars Are The Bestest
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Mar 21, 2019 00:13
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Exalted was generally just performatively anime; I mean, yeah, it has big glowing auras and a faction loosely themed around Sailor Scouts and verbose attack techniques and mecha, but the heart was always 1960s-1970s pulp fantasy lit. It's gotten more anime over time, but I'd never say it was meant to emulate a shonen or seinen story style. The anime stuff was like a skin but not the bones. If this seems like a contradiction, think back to Hunter: the Reckoning art... or the videogame... and the actual written words of the game. How it's written and how it's marketed are at odds, and that shows with fans focusing on emulating anime by it even though that's never really been the focus.
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Mar 21, 2019 00:18
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That Old Tree posted:The PDF my friends showed me looks pretty complete. ...checking my backer emails...huh, yeah, the semi-final pdf did go out. Huh. welp E: the charm sections are about half the pagecount as the core's in each case
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Mar 21, 2019 00:42
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Exalted was generally just performatively anime; I mean, yeah, it has big glowing auras and a faction loosely themed around Sailor Scouts and verbose attack techniques and mecha, but the heart was always 1960s-1970s pulp fantasy lit. It's gotten more anime over time, but I'd never say it was meant to emulate a shonen or seinen story style. The anime stuff was like a skin but not the bones. I think really you can't say Exalted—any edition—is or is not "a" thing. Maybe the 1e core book, but even that was full of contradictions and rushed work because of how it came about. Grabowski probably had the single strongest coherent vision there to start and, for better or worse, it was still a mess. As the line went on and more voices and less oversight crept in, and sacred cows became enshrined, it just sprawled. It makes some valiant efforts at coherence, but ultimately it just can't, especially after second edition.
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Mar 21, 2019 00:48
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Exalted was generally just performatively anime; I mean, yeah, it has big glowing auras and a faction loosely themed around Sailor Scouts and verbose attack techniques and mecha, but the heart was always 1960s-1970s pulp fantasy lit. It's gotten more anime over time, but I'd never say it was meant to emulate a shonen or seinen story style. The anime stuff was like a skin but not the bones. That's an interesting point. Like, it's all relative but I really like Melissa Uran's work on Exalted so that sort of thing is what I think of when I think of the game.
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Mar 21, 2019 00:52
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wiegieman posted:I honestly kind of hate the very idea of the Solars. Here are people who are just better than everyone else, just because that's their destiny. What I hate about Solars is that they're bland and generic, yet also explicitly the stars of the show and the most powerfullesst bestest. You can certainly make an interesting Solar but they're not gonna be interesting BECAUSE of the Solar, the Solarness just makes them big and strong.
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Mar 21, 2019 01:24
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Mors Rattus posted:I disagree strongly about it being more bloated and sprawling than the Solars, largely because I can read and enjoy the DB Charms by and large and I find many of the Solar ones nearly impossible to parse when they aren't hella boring. If I remember right something like 2/3rds of the Solar Charms in 3E are just straight dice-adders/dice-tricks and very rarely anything that actually allows them to do something new. They're just doing Mortal Things With More Dice, which is holy poo poo the dullest loving thematic imaginable. And of course when they actually break from that, most of what I found was either breaking into Sidereal-thematic "you rewrite reality retroactively" or impinging on Lunars with "you sprout some new limbs which glow"-stuff. As for the Great Curse what always pissed me off about the Virtues as Exalted did them was that they were more or less "do these things or your character becomes an NPC/crashes the game," just really a really dumb and unfun way to do it. Instead of punishing people for roleplaying, incentivize them to be dicks. "Hey, when you play to your particular aspect of the Great Curse, you get these benefits." Make straying from being a good person tempting, something that's actually mechanically rewarding in the short term, but has long-term consequences as former allies and bystanders start sharpening the guillotines. It's entirely possible to be pure and virtuous, but then you're lacking some punch that the assholes have, and you need to be all the more determined to actually win. I don't even really remember any of the 3E art but holy hell do I remember 2E having a lot of weird lumpen potato-faced people.
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Mar 21, 2019 01:26
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The origins (and timeframe) for Exalted I think had a big influence as to why it didn't just go whole hog into more upbeat anime/wuxia type themes. The game as originally envisioned was going to be a prequel to the World of Darkness, and was more in line with that game's sensibilities. So darker, grittier, more about lower powered solar reincarnations trying to desperately survive. Grabowski introduced more of the anime elements and higher power level, but this was still in the WW era where games could incorporate a kitchen sink of themes, many goofy and overpowered, but then the writers would yell at people for Playing it Wrong and not engaging the Super Serious Themes. Compared to the levels of alternate obsession with and embarrassment of the blade/underworld/matrix superheroes with fangs mentality, Exalted embraced its silliness much better than most of WW at the time. But it still couldn't shake that mindset completely, that it should also have Big Complex Tragic Themes. And then of course, as has already been pointed out by the time of 2nd and 3rd, the weird mishmash had been enshrined and trying to get the game towards something a little more coherent has gone...well, about as well as you'd expect.
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Mar 21, 2019 01:43
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Cooked Auto posted:Or they feel that the system can do all of those various themes and moods. Eeeeeehhhhhhhhh I'm going to be the grognard on this, but I don't think those themes and moods are compatible with Solars. Maybe DB, Lunars and Sidereal could accommodate those games, but Solars have always been Big drat (Classical) Heroes, usually with a big helping of Wuxia kungfu.
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Mar 21, 2019 01:54
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Tibalt posted:Eeeeeehhhhhhhhh I'm going to be the grognard on this, but I don't think those themes and moods are compatible with Solars. Oh yeah, I don't doubt for a second that some of those wouldn't work with the base game.
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Mar 21, 2019 02:07
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2E Exalted Dragonblood charms always felt like a really good example of Exalted's confused developer perspectives because half the charms are like bad 3E D&D feats: "You get one die if it's a full moon and you're wearing underwear on your head and one guy is on fire!" And the other half seem to think you're playing DSA: "Yes this charm allows you to ~cure tetanus~! Truly, a legendary wonder for the ages." I mean, yeah, in a game where any PC would ever conceivably catch some piddly loving disease. I mean, technically, you could have a game that could contain both GRITTY STREET-LEVEL and GLOWING COSMIC-LEVEL except it gets kind of sabotaged when your level of detail is a 1 to 5 scale. It's kind of hard to fit in both "competent peasant" and "elite demigod" on that scale without losing some granularity. Long story short the ST system is bad and sucks and should have been binned the day it was conceived.
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Mar 21, 2019 02:12
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean, technically, you could have a game that could contain both GRITTY STREET-LEVEL and GLOWING COSMIC-LEVEL except it gets kind of sabotaged when your level of detail is a 1 to 5 scale. It's kind of hard to fit in both "competent peasant" and "elite demigod" on that scale without losing some granularity. I mean it totally can work if you move towards declarative/orthogonal powers like 2e gradually leaned more and more towards, which Holden and Mørke seemed to love up until 3e where it was suddenly really important to roll a whole bunch of dice before your foregone victory over a bunch of peasants/busywork. Even when those dice seem to plug into a subsystem that they threw their hands up over and didn't include (but if you ask about that absence you get some "lol roll playing" poo poo). And they even did write a fairly good sort of tiered system for feats of strength at one point, but I don't remember if that's the one that wound up in the book.
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Mar 21, 2019 02:29
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Exalted tries to make PCs feel more special by having detailed rules for dying painfully from ab infected sword wound, then saying "but none of that applies to you of course".
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Mar 21, 2019 02:34
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 Part 13: Still a safer concert than Fyre Festival  I honestly feel like I can end my review with the previous update, but we got sixty more pages. The next section is a short story titled “Never Fade Away.” It’s meant to help Referees get used to the Cyberpunk genre, in case watching Raul Julia pretend he’s a baboon wasn’t enough. To quickly summarize the story: Johnny Silverhand and his girlfriend Alt (a Netrunner) get jumped by a group of operatives disguised as gangers after Johnny’s concert. The ops kidnap Alt and leave Johnny for dead. Johnny is saved by Trauma Team, and soon finds out the who, why, and where from a reporter named Thompson. The Arasaka corporation wants Alt to create a super-special Anti-Personnel program called Soulkiller, that can roam the Net freely, wipe the mind of targets, and save their brain pattern. Because of the processing power needed to write Soulkiller, Alt would have to be at the main office in downtown Night City. Johnny hires a Solo/Nomad team of Rogue (also Johnny’s ex) and Santiago, and after ditching some Arasaka mooks they come up with a plan to rescue Alt. Johnny quickly sets up a concert out in front of Arasaka’s office and gets a crowd of 6,000 to riot. While the mob overwhelms Arasaka’s security and guts the lower floors, Johnny, Rogue, Santiago and Thomson (who’s tagging along cause he’s got a hate boner for the corp.) push through to the upper levels with a combination of stair/elevator switches and timed explosives. While this is going on the story switches to Alt’s perspective as she is held in Arasaka’s main suite. An executive named Toshiro confirms Thompson’s theory on why she was kidnapped. We also learn from Alt that Soulkiller is actually a seed AI that needs a human brain pattern to operate independently - and that if she completes it, that pattern will be her. While pretending to cooperate, Alt uses the program writer to start rewriting the mainframe. As soon as she completes Soulkiller, she uses it to kill the three Netrunners watching her and then commands the suite’s defense turrets to fry Arasaka’s head of security (Akira, the Super Goon from part 7). Alt has the situation under control when the last set of explosives jars Alt’s body and disconnects her interface plugs, trapping her mind inside Soulkiller. Johnny and his Scooby Gang finds Alt’s body and immediately recognize what happened. Feeling very sad, Johnny blows out Toshiro’s brains before shuffling out, while spoopy cyberghost Alt watches from the security cameras. Fin. While primarily a story, the section also provides stats on how to run this as an adventure, starting from when Johnny hires Rogue and Santiago. The book even says players can even take the role of NPCs, which I think is a nice improvement over most games where such characters are off limits. Rogue is pretty OP. The rest, well, aren’t Solos. But like the goons, their stats are incomplete, and Rogue also has an impossibly high REF like the Super Goon.  The book provides lots of maps (but no scale, so have fun using them for combat). Maps of the bar Johnny meets Rogue in, maps of the concert plaza, and maps for each of the floors of the Arasaka office. There’s a rule for playing out the concert scene and the face off between the concert crowd and the security force, but it’s really perfunctory and there’s no way to apply it to other situations. There’s not much to say about this. While it’s pretty threadbare as an “adventure” it admittedly wasn’t meant to be one to begin with. It’s still better than the other adventures presented later. I’ll finish up this update with my favorite hobby: dunking on the Media role. Here’s how reporter Thompson concludes his arc when he reaches the top of Arasaka's building: Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. posted:His green cyberoptic winks bright as he transmits live and direct to his news net; his head swivels right to left with practiced ease as he subvocalizes the opening to his story; the story he will use to break Arasaka in Night City. Now the events of this story are actually on the timeline from two sections ago, so this all happens in 2012. After their office got trashed, Arasaka replaces their twenty-two story office with a proper 100-story doom tower and are still the dominant corporate power in Night City. Good story, Thompson!  Oh and the only reason Arasaka doesn’t call the cops to break up the riot is because it would be a loss of face. Just wanted to mention that.  not really a scene from the story, but it was included here Next Time: Big Business of the Twenty First Century SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Mar 21, 2019 |
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Mar 21, 2019 02:36
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The Lone Badger posted:Exalted tries to make PCs feel more special by having detailed rules for dying painfully from ab infected sword wound, then saying "but none of that applies to you of course". Exalted is a massively rules heavy game with a premise that desperately wants to be rules light. I usually prefer crunch, but the kind of stuff Exalted is trying to model is not the kind of thing where you want heavy stats on everything and you want to focus much more on narrative.
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Mar 21, 2019 02:36
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Night10194 posted:Exalted is a massively rules heavy game with a premise that desperately wants to be rules light. I usually prefer crunch, but the kind of stuff Exalted is trying to model is not the kind of thing where you want heavy stats on everything and you want to focus much more on narrative.
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Mar 21, 2019 02:53
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e: this post is the work of an enemy stand
Nessus fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Mar 21, 2019 |
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Mar 21, 2019 03:21
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Nessus posted:For me what is interesting is when you have a real strong power or ability and it has a number of limitations on it, which produce narrative interest and challenge, and give you something to overcome. This would probably work really well for Exalted, though it would make the powers more idiosyncratic (but would that be a bad thing?) That's what the Sidereal Exalted are supposed to be all about (mechanically) - very weird and limited powers that do the weird limited thing they do incredibly effectively. I believe the original Sidereals designer was Jenna Moran.
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Mar 21, 2019 03:41
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