[Exalted 3rd Edition] Third Time's a Charm.

italianranma

In the Second Age of the flat world of Creation, the Scarlet Empress and her Dragon-blooded dynasty struggle to maintain the very fabric of the world from reverting to unformed Chaos. On the fringes, rival shogunates squabble over the last few remaining doomsday relics of First Age, while the ever encroaching forces of the alien fair folk consume cities whole. From their prisons in the Underworld, the defeated Primordials plot the ultimate destruction of their traitorous creations: both man and the gods. All this was foretold in the last age when the world rose up against the chosen of the Unconquered Sun, most powerful of the gods: the Solar Exalted. So too was foretold their eventual return, but the prophesy was not clear. Their return may be the start of a new golden age, or simply hasten the end of this one.

When you can't achieve your power fantasies through D&D...

In essence :winky:, Exalted is a tabletop RPG game originally published by White Wolf in 2001. It uses a modified version of the Storyteller (ST) system where the character’s natural attributes and learned abilities create a pool of d10 dice. The dice are rolled, and every die that rolls above the target number is counted as a success. More success allow for better results. While the system is used across all of White Wolf Publishing’s franchises, Exalted does not take place in the World of Darkness (WoD), and the characters are not compatible with those that do (no Exalted in Vampire: The Masquerade for example).

The Setting

It's not anything like Tolkien

In the Beginning, the Primordials, immense beings of power, brought Order to Chaos, and in doing so made Creation. Their work hardly ended as without constant attention, Creation would entropy back to its natural state of formless Chaos. And so gods were created to maintain Creation, allowing the Primordials to go off and frolic and play Minecraft all day. The gods however grew restless and plotted their own usurpation. When the gods rebelled against the Primordials, they were unable to do so directly, and instead chose certain mortals of the realm who displayed the necessary heroism to champion. They infused these humans with their own divine spark and in doing so created the Exalted, demi-gods. These Exalts raised armies of mortals, armed them with fearful relics, and fought a terrifying war against the Primordials, killing half of them and imprisoning the other half in the Underworld. After that Creation ushered into a golden age of peace and prosperity known as the Golden Age.

However, with their dying breath the Primordials cursed the Exalted. It manifested itself differently in each exalted, but most prominently in the Solar, who fell prone to terrifying fits of rage and hubris. Eventually the Dragon-Blooded, most numerous but least powerful of the Exalted, rose up and disposed of the Solars, trapping their divine sparks in the Jade Prison and breaking the cycle of reincarnation. Without the Solars to lead, create, and rule, the glory of the Golden Age faded away as the awesome relics of the Solars were destroyed, lost, or left unused for lack of knowledge, and the dynastic families of the Dragon-blooded waged petty war against each other throwing the realm into chaos and darkness. Eventually the Scarlet Empress was able to unify and bring order to the realm, stopping the most widespread of the carnage, but the damage was already done, and the world had entered into a new age, the Second Age, the Age of Strife.

For 800 years the Realm, and by extension Creation maintained a slow but steady downward spiral toward oblivion. But the chosen of the Unconquered Sun have returned. And with their return lies the smallest chance of redemption and salvation.

The appeal of the game

Exalted differs from other games of the genre by tone and scale. While D&D is very much High Fantasy, Exalted is often called ‘pulp fantasy’ referring to the harsh penalties of disease, damage, and death along with many of its influences: Conan, The Dying Earth, Elric to name a few. Player Characters exist in this background but stand out front of it by being demi-gods. Again to compare Exalted to D&D, a lvl 1 fighter might know a thing or two about swords, but your fledgling Dawn Caste Solar might be one of the top 10 swordfighters in the world. Instead of working towards the Epic level, Solar start at the mid to upper tier of Paragon, and work toward goals that affect the very whole of Creation. To quote Holden Shearer (one of the developers) as to the feats a 5 Essence Solar Exalted can do:

Holden Shearer wrote:

“Found religions, build up nations or knock them down or take them over, raise vast all-consuming armies with which to conquer as much map as you can grab and then try to weld the resulting chaos into an empire, unearth the lost glories of the time before, drag gods down from their gilded temples and behead them in front of their followers, fight giant monsters, engage in high-stakes romance with beautiful and deadly faeries from the Lands Beyond Creation, put cities to the flame in order to prosecute ancient vendettas, steer the course of history and preserve the sanctity of the shape of what must be for tomorrow to come, advance the political and financial interests of your family and followers, begin a civil war to win a throne set over the world, plumb the harrowing depths of sorcery, descend to seek knowledge or power or love among the dead and then ascend back to the world of the living, begin an eternal crusade to avenge yourself upon the world, challenge the greatest warriors alive to prove that you are the strongest fighter to have ever lived, create enduring alliances to weather the rigors of a time of chaos, amass vast wealth and live in splendor and fight off all who would seek to take what is now yours, look for purpose and meaning in a world that seems to have no place for you, sit down to play at dice or diplomacy with the Princes of Hell, forge splendid weapons of legend, attempt to restore the former splendor of a crumbling world, explore lost or forgotten or wholly undiscovered frontiers, punch Wong Bongerok in the dick, etc, etc, etc.”

The reasoning behind 3rd Edition
...or more quotes, this time from John Mørke

John Mørke wrote:

“There were a few reasons that we needed to launch a third edition. Ultimately I pushed for it to save my writers a lot of pain and misery, and to refresh the awesome player base and bring new blood back to revitalize the product, as well as attract the customers that were lost during a shaky second edition.

The pain and misery would have been in the form of a near-endless slog through tons and tons of errata that we needed to do on books in Second Edition that were published with non-functional mechanics. Not only was it impractical from a money standpoint–because we were doing any errata for free–but it’s also a waste of a writer, to make them spend all their time and creativity going over someone else’s work to fix problems. It was killing the morale and the energy and the goodwill of my team–and my team consists of some of the most solid writers for any game line of the last five years. It was just a matter of conservation of product; in order to turn out more good products, we needed our writers not to walk off the line.

It was also a matter of needing it. I think that you can gauge the health of any game by the amount of conversation it generates. I believe that after ten years of a fairly static setting, the same conversations were being had over and over and nothing new was being said. It was becoming more difficult to write new Exalted books, or expand without undoing or redoing vast tracts of what had already been laid out. As we were confronted with the last three proposed Second Edition books–Masters of Jade, Shards of the Exalted Dream, and Scroll of the Monk II– it was clear to me that the idea mill was winding down and we were almost certainly going to end up redoing Second Edition books and packaging them with errata–a situation I dearly wanted to avoid. Fortunately by that time, Holden Shearer and I had already been building the framework for EX3 for about a year. When White Wolf came to us with the possibility of a third edition, we pounced; I had a lot of plans already constructed. I am always thinking around corners.

I had just been seeing a lot of fans who needed the game’s discussion to be reset, to have it pulled back to the beginning so that the topic could be refreshed, perhaps with new ideas, new lines of thought and new conclusions to be had. I knew that the best thing for everyone would be if we were to just relaunch Exalted and give it all the love and affection we’d been showing it since Glories in ’09.”

More to follow. (Thank you PVMer for the thread title).

italianranma

What We Know So Far

The developers have been very tight-lipped on the actual mechanics of the game, but there is a wiki that has collected what information is available. To explain… No, there is too much. Let me sum up. The system is being reworked from the ground up promising faster more involved gameplay. Many of the underlying mechanics from 2nd edition are completely reworked with the intent to capture the ‘feel’ of classic 1st edition but provide a new modern and balanced approach. The release date isn’t currently known (the Kickstarter fulfillment has Oct for the PDF version), but it has been pushed back continually since last year.

Why I’m So Hard Excited About This

I never got an Exalted game of 1st or 2nd ed going, but I played a few one-offs and bought the core-books to browse. I liked the depth of the game and the setting, but just never got around to playing or buying any of the splatbooks. That being said what’s really won me over are the developers; both by how proliferate they are on forums, and by the way that they talk about RPG mechanics. I get the impression that they’re avid gamers who understand how to build a game for a variety of audiences and are willing to put aside their own biases to create a truly well-crafted game.

Further Reading

http://nishkriya.theanathema.com/ - this website tracks any new posts from the developers since the last time you visited the site: very useful once you've gotten caught up on the forums.

http://nobilis.me/quotes-exalted - this is a collection of blog posts and other musings by the developers. There are some really good reads in here, and it's here that I became so impressed with the devs.

http://avatarcomic.net/ExaltedWiki/mediawiki-1.19.1/index.php?title=Exalted_3E:_What_We_Know - this is the above wiki with all the collected info up to this point.

Deluxe Hardcover Kickstarter out now!

I'm only mentioning this (and with permission) because this will likely be your only chance to purchase a [edit] Deluxe hardcover version of this book. I won't link the site, but I'm sure you won't have trouble finding it.

The Kickstarter was wildly successful, and also wildly optimistic about this edition's release date. When asked about the actual release date the Sidereal furitively whisper in corners about ink monkeys usurping the Loom of Fate. The May 2014 release on the Onyx Path publishing schedule is a lie, spread by the Realm for fears of anathema sympathies.


Let the discussion begin!

gtrmp

John Morke wrote:

OKAY, so here's what I have to say about the Getimian Exalted.

The Getimian Exalted run off a system of Getimian Alchemy, in which they use sutras, katas—intense martial training developed by Rakan Thulio—to control their internal forces and release them. In a very similar sense to Sidereals, the Getimians can conduct their will along the threads of destiny by working their will internally through carefully balancing, combining, or interrupting the flow of yin and yang Essence through their bodies and then forcing it outward.

Within each Getimian is a Loom of Fate. Pattern spiders race up and down their spines, their bones are the spun webs of destiny, their minds cycling through constant states of universal motion and the flow of the world. With a thought the pattern spiders within shift Essence between his chakras, giving him new power with which to enhance his actions, or disrupt the pattern of destiny.

We have built a fuckin' awesome new Charm paradigm for these guys, based largely on which mote pool you pay with. Paying from your yin pool or from your yang pool could change the entire effect of a Charm.

I will let Holden explain in more detail.

Holden Shearer wrote:

The Getimians are unlike the other Exalts you're familiar with in that their Personal and Peripheral Essence pools are the same size. Personal Essence is 'Yin' Essence-- dark, cold, passive, consumptive, negative energy. Peripheral Essence is 'Yang' Essence-- bright, hot, active, positive, creative energy. Some of their Charms can only be powered by one kind of Essence or the other; others don't care what you're spending; and still other Charms will behave in markedly different ways depending on what you're feeding them with. Their magic will also start to behave very differently as the two pools grow imbalanced with regards to one another. Some Getimians specialize in the use of one variety of Essence or the other, while others apply a more balanced approach-- this is down to their style as an individual.

Getimian Alchemy is a mechanically separate system from their Charmset, reminiscent of but also markedly different than Sidereal Astrology. More detail on it will have to wait until later in the Kickstarter...

Grey Paladin

The art style looks neat. I just hope the mechanics are decent. When even WotC beats you on the balance front you are kind of in trouble.

Auralynx

Grey Paladin wrote: »

The art style looks neat. I just hope the mechanics are decent. When even WotC beats you on the balance front you are kind of in trouble.

Yeah, Exalted was a giant mechanical disaster. Everything people liked about White Wolf, particularly W:tA, plus everything they didn't all bundled up into one awkward mess with really cool flavor.

PMAvers

You know, for however much of mess the old editions were mechanics-wise...

...they were still a bloody blast to play.

Auralynx

PMAvers wrote: »

You know, for however much of mess the old editions were mechanics-wise...

...they were still a bloody blast to play.

So was Werewolf! It's a really entertaining setting; one of my 4E DMs had most of the hardbacks and I'd flip through them between turns. I never actually got to roll a fistful of dice to hit a guy with a sword, but it seemed like it'd be fun in practice if you'd worked out your combos and whatnot in advance.

italianranma

Balance is such a sticky topic, and often when two people talk about it, they're talking about different things. A discussion about internal balance (choosing this ability v. this ability) starts talking about balancing tropes within the setting (magic-user v. non-magic-user) becomes a topic about situational balance etc. I was looking for some quotes were the devs talk about how they're solving the mechanical problems of 2E. In a nutshell they're using bounded accuracy and flatter power curves (among other things that we don't know about yet), but by far what impressed me the most was reading this discussion by Holden Shearer, which I'll quote in full under the spoiler since it's a lot of reading.

Holden Shearer wrote:

[On the subject of 2E 6 to 10 essence]

So this is a thorny yet very interesting topic.

Let me open by noting that we're going to get clobbered no matter how we handle this, just so you can get an idea where the thinking started. There are several mutually contradictory tensions at play here.

I'll start by laying out some truths as we understand them:

• There are concepts that are useful as building-pieces for a game, and there are concepts that are useful simply to have around as concepts. Take Golconda, in Vampire. They eventually went into Golconda, years into the game, but for a whole decade they never really needed to— it was a rich contribution to the game as a mechanics-free idea, an ideal for players and Storytellers to imagine and tell stories about and dream of, and for their characters to dream of. It was rare, and poorly understood, and you could tell lots of stories about characters trying to figure it out. Golconda was useful as an idea, moreso than as a concrete thing, because as a thing it was one thing, but as an idea it could mean and be many things to many people.

• The ten-dot scale is illusory and always has been. Considering the sheer depth of Essence dots 2-5, there just isn't enough material there to add five more discrete notches to the scale. As such, Essence 10 was always really more of an ideal, a talismanic stand-in for "unimaginable power." Essence 6 was a conceptual stand-in for "the land over the hill," the thing that you can imagine but not grasp—power beyond what you have now. Basically, imagining yourself, but an order of magnitude more badass! Essence 7-9 were a kind of conceptual dead zone, there just weren't that many real gradations along the line, at least not for Exalts. The scale was more workable for gods, because gods are simple things compared to an Exalted Charm set, without nearly as much depth, and it's a lot easier to understand the difference between an Essence 6 and Essence 8 god than it is between an Essence 6 and Essence 8 Larceny Charm.

And yes, I know we tried to put a 6-10 "meanings" scale in DotFA. Like I've said before, we took some magnificent stabs at doing the impossible back in the day, and carried it off pretty well in some cases; but at no point did I ever kid myself that the scale produced wasn't shaky as hell.

• Lots of ideas just don't scale when you stretch them that far, especially when the lower-echelon stuff ramps up so fast. By Essence 3, a Solar fighter can launch attacks that cannot be avoided by any means, dodge any attack no matter what, and land blows capable of extinguishing the immortal Essence of the titans that built the world. By Essence 6 he swings his sword and kills armies, and cleaves hurricanes in twain, and can land attacks that inflict infinite damage. Even in the arena of combat, escalation becomes problematic (and SUPER problematic for anyone having to fight someone rocking these inflated powers). In other categories, it gets even uglier; by Essence 3, a thief can steal anything flawlessly without chance of failure or being noticed. Where do you go up from that? How can you get even better? How can you get seven whole categories of better? Even if you move into crazy stuff like stealing souls or stealing everything in a whole city, that's only maybe three jumps up the ladder— that still leaves four to go. Again, the scale is illusory.

• There's a contradiction in expectations when it comes to high-Essence power. On the one hand, people love imagining their First Age prior incarnations as these absurd Dragonball Z continent-shattering ultragods. On the other hand, some of those guys are still around; and people want the mechanics to support them. The World of Darkness has a well known Elder Problem, wherein the ancients are so much stronger than you that you may as well just put away the dice and bend over when they show up because no head-on confrontation is possible— it's like an ant confronting a man. People don't really like that experience in Exalted, they do not come to Exalted to play an ant. But they want to imagine ancient elder entities in the game as men next to ants. This, by the way, is the point where we can't win.

• After some thought, we came to the understanding that men and ants aren't really necessary or desirable for our game, and that you don't need that dichotomy to still allow for jaw-dropping feats of amazing coolness to still exist (the Solar swordsman cleaving the top off a mountain and then surfing it down into the army of demons in the valley below, etc). To elaborate:

• We asked ourselves, "what can a Solar at Essence 8 or 9 or 10 do that a Solar at Essence 5 can't?" and really the ultimate answer was "nothing." This clarified a lot of things for us.

• We thought about what we'd want a fight between a circle of young Solars and Ma-Ha-Suchi to look like, and the answer was ultimately "brilliant high-energy kung fu fight," rather than something different. So we started wondering what, exactly, Ma-Ha-Suchi needs to be able to do that a really old, seasoned, experienced E5 Lunar couldn't do, and the answer again seemed to be "nothing, really."

• In fact, in all the casting about for stuff, we found very few effects that were to the game's benefit that didn't seem to be able to exist in the E1-5 range. We looked at elder Exalt after elder Exalt and asked, "what signature thing does this person have that sets them apart from others of their kind, that clearly emerges from their elder Essence rating?" and really the only thing that cropped up was Leviathan as Whalezilla.

• The Exalted system is an abstraction rather than a representation of how the setting works and how characters in the setting work. As a result, drawing the line up to the point where you become something all out of scope with your own nature and representing that as just more of the same stuff that represents the standard was……… not really smart.

What does this mean in terms of EX3's support for high Essence?

You can expect high Essence to still be a thing that exists. You can expect to eventually get stats for Mask of Winters & etc— you will be able to fight him and it will not be a 1e Kukla situation where it's like "turn in your character sheets." You can eventually expect to see Ma-Ha-Suchi and Leviathan and probably Kejak statted.

What you shouldn't expect is for us to jump right back into anything like Dreams of the First Age rules. You probably shouldn't expect the power curve to look the same. You shouldn't expect to load your character up on E6+ Charms— what ancient Exalts look like mechanically is still a matter under discussion and refinement, but at this point I really, really doubt they're represented by having E6+ Charms that cost 8xp each. And I am dead certain they're not going to be running around with Dex 10, Melee 10, because doing that melts the probability curves the system runs on all by itself.

That last statement is probably going to spark a shitstorm all by itself. Before you start shouting angrily, check this out. I am not discussing design philosophy there, I'm discussing math. If we give Kejak Dex 10, Martial Arts 10, it won't matter what Charms he does or doesn't have because your character cannot hit him— the odds of it happening are somewhere below 1%. That's a stupid place to start an epic kung fu fight from.

It's not just what he says in here, but the way he presents the information that really impresses me. He talks about both mechanics and math, about feel and balance. As I read more of what these guys write I get more and more the sense that they aren't approaching this as gamers or as developers but as enlightened gamer/developers.

Auralynx

Trying to tackle the fistful of dice problem head-on is probably doomed, in a sense, if they stay married to the old-style WoD rules, but it's good to see them realizing the power curve they were working with had positively Himalayan peaks and that it was a big part of the problem.

italianranma

Holden Shearer wrote:

It's that time. For those of you joining us from Kickstarter-land or other forums, welcome

Just a little preliminary before we get started though—I know everyone really wants to see this but for the sake of my sanity as I reply to the thread please try to keep the following in mind:

• The point of this thread is to explain the play dynamic of the EX3 combat engine. I'm not showing off the mechanics of the EX3 combat engine in this thread. The combat rules are 7,000 words long, and I put them all there so the rules would be clear and cover everything. I don't want to show off just part of the rules and leave people walking away thinking we missed stuff! I also am not going to post the entire combat rules section before the book is out because I want you to actually buy the book to play the game

(For the sake of comparison, the EX2 combat rules were about 17,000 words long; this is a much leaner system.)

• This isn't the EX2 combat engine plus slight clean-up. The old paradigm does not apply, EX3 has not been built around it. It's not the nWoD engine either. It is a new thing that should be easy to grasp and use for long-time White Wolf fans (and also for newcomers), but also visibly different from anything they've used before in a WW game. Anyone citing the EX2 combat engine as a reason this or that won't work gets banished to the land of wind and ghosts!

• This thread is going to have lots of people flocking to it to read this post from the Kickstarter and other messageboards, so let's try not to get too much blood on the floor in front of our guests emotion-1.gif

Okay, that said--

The Philosophy of EX3 combat.

Exalted 1 and Exalted 2 both used what I think of an 'action model' combat engines-- that is to say, when you rolled your dice pool, that represented a discrete action. This dice roll is an attack, for example, and it tells me how good the attack is.

This is a good model in that it feels very textured and involved-- "my roll represents my attack, and because I'm a ferociously skilled swordsman, I get to roll a lot of dice." That's visceral, and good.

The problem of the system was that what Exalted wanted to emulate, when two of its larger-than-life heroes battled, was the martial clashes of cinema (whether this meant Errol Flynn, Chinese wuxia, or Jedi lightsaber battles was largely up to the tastes of the group playing). And Exalted did a fairly faithful job of recreating this! Unfortunately, an action-by-action recitation of such a battle usually looks like this: *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *dead*

That's faithful to the source material, but we felt that it had problems as a gameplay model-- as a player, it was frustrating. It felt like you were getting nowhere, until very suddenly you won or lost. But in the epics, and in cinema (again, this is true whether you're talking Shaw Brothers kung fu, Lu Bu vs the Brotherhood of the Peach Orchard, or Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader), most of the storytelling of the fight is contained in that "dead zone" where every swing is getting blocked or dodged or only banging the enemy around and otherwise generally not accomplishing its main goal of killing or defeating the other guy. It's not just whiff-whiff-whiff-- we can look at that fight and see how the momentum of the battle is running, we can tell who's winning and losing, and we can tell when someone has just pulled a marvelous reversal and is mounting a comeback. When Luke and Vader fight in Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader only strikes a single blow that really injures Luke-- the last one that cuts off his hand-- but we can see that Vader is clearly dominating the fight before that. Luke makes a desperate strike near the end, but only manages to graze Vader's arm and goad him on finish things by battering Luke to the end of the bridge and ending the fight with a decisive blow. That's good storytelling, that's an exciting fight scene-- much more than just the sum of "whiff whiff whiff whiff over."

That's what EX3 aims to capture, by turning the 'dead zone' into something compelling.

In Exalted Third Edition, the majority of attacks heroes launch at one another don't damage the opponent's health track*. Instead, these attacks are used to build momentum, gain the upper hand, and place the character in an advantageous position relative to his opponent(s!). They are also calculated to stymie the enemy's attempts to do the same, to disrupt his tempo, and to confound his efforts to harm you. If an attack of this sort succeeds, then it might force the opponent back, batter down his defenses, push him into disadvantageous position, or even land a blow that rattles him but inflicts no telling injury.

Once you feel you've garnered sufficient advantage, your character can attempt to launch an attack which can damage the enemy's Health Track-- and if you've fought well enough, picked your moment well, and the dice are with you, you might even slay your opponent in a single well-aimed blow, striking off his head or running him through! However, attempting to strike such a blow with undue haste can be quite risky-- it might even create an opportunity for the opponent to turn the tables completely, and seize control of the fight!

This is the battle dynamics philosophy of EX3, and is the result its combat engine has been designed to realize.

*Note: This is a mechanical abstraction intended to represent the ebb and flow of cinematic combat, not an actual thing that exists in the setting. When a Solar and an Abyssal are swinging daiklaves at one another, they very much are trying to cut and kill their enemy with each blow-- even if we, the players, know that all the attacks this round are able to do is to win them advantage.

Ringo

I am hopeful about this

Rainfall

Auralynx wrote: »

Trying to tackle the fistful of dice problem head-on is probably doomed, in a sense, if they stay married to the old-style WoD rules, but it's good to see them realizing the power curve they were working with had positively Himalayan peaks and that it was a big part of the problem.

I'm not entirely sure where I heard it, so this may be complete bullshit, But I seem to recall Holden saying that the die pools will cap out at around 26 dice.

Which is a lot, but since I've seen 100+ pools get rolled, I'm kind of thankful it's not more.

Capfalcon

Well, I'm disappointed that it looks like I can't get a dead tree version for less than 100 dollars, which is a bit out of my price range.

Still, really excited about the game, and if I have to read it on a PDF to play it, I guess I'll just suck it up.

Also, on the off chance you're reading this Holden Shearer, that whole talk about the conceptual space of Essence 7 to 9 not really having anything importance in it really sold me on this game.

italianranma

@Capfalcon, Onyx Path/White wolf's new business model is to sell their books through Drive-through RPG dot net. You'll have the option there for a dead tree copy using their print on demand function. The Kickstarter is for a deluxe hardcover with color pages, etc.

Capfalcon

And now I feel even better about my decision.

Thanks!

OptimusZed

I was always intrigued by the concept of Exalted, but I think playing Hero and Champion has left me with an aversion from systems that take a ton of time to resolve anything.

If they're clearing that up, I'll probably check it out. At some option below the $300 gold-plated book level.

Rainfall

Holden Shearer on SA wrote:

The SA thread has been super cool through the KS so far so, tell you what, I'll drop one.

(Though I've talked about this before, here and there.)

There is no mass combat system.

No 'extras' either.

What you have instead is a thing called a battle group.

When a group of what 1e or 2e would call 'extras' show up, they are automatically abstracted into a battle group, which is basically, on a mechanical level, a katamari made of ninjas. It's a ninja + some very easy-to-remember bonuses, with a big health-track that wraps around several times and which can potentially have its morale 'break' and panic and run away as you keep lapping the health track and killing dudes, well before you actually kill all the ninjas.

"Mass combat" is just a combat in which very large battle groups show up, i.e., it is absolutely no different than regular combat, i.e., there is no mass combat system. An army is just a really big battle group (or, potentially, several really big ones).

The battle group functions a bit differently than an individual character in terms of how it interacts with health damage and wrasslin' for momentum, but again, the rules difference is extremely simple and easy to remember and use. I think all told, there are four mechanical differences between a BG and a solo character-- "make sure these rules are easy to remember and use" was the top priority in putting together battle groups.

I dig this, and it makes me very curious about War charms.

Capfalcon

So, "The Return To The Revenge Of The Tomb Of Five Corners" is the tentative name for the quickstart adventure.

Why has everyone not given these people all of your money?

Rainfall

It won't actually be about the Tomb of Five Corners or called that.

Pledge cancelled.

Auralynx

Capfalcon wrote: »

So, "The Return To The Revenge Of The Tomb Of Five Corners" is the tentative name for the quickstart adventure.

Why has everyone not given these people all of your money?

Because it's not called Celestial Chance-Adapting Method for the Promotion of Harmonic Discourse and Rapturous Enjoyment: Return of the Emerald Kingfisher.

Edith Upwards

Kejak Chejop Bobblehead
Artifact •

These simple dolls portraying the Bronze Faction leader can be purchased on nearly any corner in Yu-Shan. With a one-mote commitment, they can be made to say anything that the owner desires, provided they are within one yard. Their voice is tinny and could never be mistaken for the actual Kejak Chejop, but this has not stopped daring young Gold Faction Sidereals from holding contests to make him say the most absurd things. To the continual annoyance of their elders, the doll is even popular among the younger members of the Bronze Faction, though they are at least more circumspect with what they do with it. Some Bronze Faction elders suspect that Ayesha Ura is responsible for their production, though they have never been able to prove anything.

Though he would never admit it, Kejak himself owns one, which he keeps hidden in a back drawer on his desk, and which he has mock-arguments with when he believes no one is looking.

italianranma

This Friday (17 May) there will be additional limited reward tiers on the kickstarter. These are things like having your own custom charm made, having character art made by the official artists, or getting your character's name in a fiction piece somewhere down the line. If this kinda crazy waste of money appeals to you, start updating at 0800 EDT.

I've been following a lot of the developer's comments closely, so if anyone has questions or wants me to look something up, I'm happy to do so. There's a tremendous amount of chaff on the official forums: people arguing about whether the name of a Lunar exalted should be Seven Devil Clever or Seven Devils Clever for example.

Edith Upwards

Books: Hundred Devil Chronicle, The Realm, Dragon-Blooded: What Fire Has Wrought, Scarlet Manual of Proper Bearing, Guide to the Heptagram, Different Skies Volume 1, Heroes of the Niobrarans, untitled God-Blooded book(?), Of Crown and Sword, untitled Exigents hardback, Exalted vs. World of Darkness.

Hundred Devil Chronicle is a bestiary of animals and stranger things. It has heavy utility for Lunars in mind, with special animal moves a la Dungeon World's druids.

The Realm is more of a cultural guide than a travelogue like Compass: Blessed Isle.

Scarlet Manual of Proper Bearing centers around Dynastic upbringing and schooling, and features guides to run games with elemental demigods in high school.

Guide to the Heptagram contains in-character writing introducing the reader to life at the Heptagram, and also contains an assortment of spells.

Different Skies Volume 1 covers the river province and parts of the West. Both regions are faced with a new menace (the Mask of Winters and the newly tightening grip of the Realm) which threatens them collectively if they do not set aside their bitter differences and band together. The West has traditionally escaped most of the Realm's controls, due to the Scarlet Empress not wishing Western satraps to grow too powerful and secede to rule their satrapies themselves. It's an exotic place viewed as a place of faraway riches for most of Creation.

Heroes of the Niobarans covers a war in the early First Age between the Exalted host, fresh from the defeat of the Ancients, and the Niobaran civilization, a thriving underwater empire powerful enough to push the Exalted's backs against the wall. Some new enemy Exalted are involved somehow, that do not spring from the Incarna.

God-Blooded are still in, and receive mechanics of their own instead of having to borrow from spirit Charmsets or Arcanoi or the like. The power ceiling for God-Blooded is gone, leaving room for exceptionally powerful God-Blooded around. God-Blooded and Exigents are separate due to base power levels and being Exalted, but the focus is on being a hero being about your heroism, not about whether you've got an anima banner or what color it is.

Of Crown and Sword is an attempt to do for politics and conquest what Masters of Jade did for trade and commerce: a focus on how to include it in a game, with many examples presented.

The Exigent book contains several sample Exigents with their Charmsets, as well as many design essays on how to write and balance an Exalted pantheon, and a "Charm matrix" of rules for as many conceivable supernatural powers as the crunch writers can fit in, divorced from costs or prerequisites. Exigents are not one type of Exalted but many different types, and a given type of Exigent could range in power all the way from the Dragon-Blooded to matching a Solar.

Exalted vs. World of Darkness doesn't use the 3e rules, but rather a modified version of the V20 rules, provided within the book. It provides for the main types of Old World of Darkness supernaturals as well as a somewhat toned-down version of Solars, Lunars and Sidereals so that they don't immediately wreck up the place all over.

PMAvers

You know, I just realized that the OP didn't go for a awful pun in the thread title like "Third Time's a Charm."

Edith Upwards

This must be rectified immediately!

Chomp-Chomp

Found this mechanical tidbit from the kickstarter comments:

Holden wrote: »

This applies to Solar Excellencies, other guys MAY work differently:
You automatically get an Excellency in all of your Caste and Favored Abilities as soon as you put a single dot into them. On all non-Caste/Favored Abilities, you get your Excellency as soon as you buy a Charm for that Ability. A Solar never has to pay XP for his Excellencies.

Feels soooo good. It's like everything is getting fixed!

Also, Exalted v World of Darkness: The Punchening

Gokerz

This might be interesting for anyone who lives close to Jacksonville, FL:
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?716677-Exalted-Third-Edition-Playtest-(Jacksonville-FL)

If you live in or around Jacksonville and can make it here on a Friday/Saturday/Sunday in the near future, I plan on running some live EX3 playtests.

Please post to this thread if you are able and interested. Knowledge of Exalted is not a requirement.

Solar

I am not even in the right goddamn continent!

Hopefully we will get some good info as a result of that though!

Rainfall

Info? On EX3? Perish the thought!

Solar

Yeah they have been very shy about telling us, well

anything

hopefully as playtesting gets resolved and they get to the point where it's layout and so on, they'll let some stuff go

italianranma

I've been trolling the forums and http://nishkriya.com/ and they're very vocal about what it isn't going to be like. The kickstarter updates are pretty decent and give updates on the status of various chapters, but it's difficult to garner the overall progress from them. I could probably go through them all and collate all the info to get a better idea.

Gokerz

I am thinking about reading some old 1st edition actual plays, as 3rd edition is supposed to go more for that tone and style. Might be a good way to get a bit more hyped for the release and slowly get back into the Exalted groove.
Does anyone have any favourites that are fun to read that they'd care to list?

Solar

Well, what something isn't going to be like isn't hugely inspiring

I mean, saying "yeah it was shit before, it won't be shit now!" is a fair thing to say

But it doesn't tell me anything about what the game will actually end up doing

italianranma

You'd think at this point they could release at least the core gameplay and a few more example charms at least. But I do understand why they're so hesitant to really reveal anything. For one, the Onyx Path forums (having taken over from the WW ones) are Fukushima levels of toxic: the grognards of WW games make D&D ones look pleasant by comparison. For another, in this business it can be really hard to make a profit, and leaking info like that can deter sales if it creates a negative reaction which it likely will since sweeping changes and grognards do not mix. Plus, there are a lot of people who will simply buy the core book out of curiosity and demos have proven to lower those sales.

Now on the other hand, this game is incredibly late. I came onboard when they said the release date was going to be Dec '12 IIRC. I don't know what the usual development timelines are, but how can you underestimate your time needed by that much? They've explained the reason behind that as needing to design the core book with the next 3-4 years of splatbooks in mind, but still...

I'm going to go through the Kickstarter emails and see if I can put together where they're at.

Gokerz

Over on the OPP forum Mørke mentioned that he is managing around 200 playtesters.
That seems like a lot, though probably not quite D&D levels.
Does give some trust that the game will be rigorously tested.

Solar

200 playtesters is more playtesters than we have in the tabletop game Beta Playtest that I am currently participating in

I'd say that's a lot for an RPG

Hudds

I'd rather it be extremely late and well done than on-time and cobbled together. I love this setting, but I've never been a big fan of the system's ability to handle it. The developer descriptions are encouraging, but I'll try not to get my hopes too high.

italianranma

There weren't as many updates as I thought... As I was complaining to a friend about, it's difficult to judge the overall progress from these updates; Thomas uses words like "done" to mean that the first draft has been completed and is ready for playtesting. "In editing" means that the final draft has been submitted to the layout editor. Sometimes they talk about numbered chapters, sometimes they talk about engines, and sometimes they talk about individual elements of the game, but they never talk about overall progress. AFAIK, they haven't even committed to this year other than a comment from Holden (I think?) who said they'd be pretty disappointed in themselves if they didn't have the book out until '15. Regardless, here's what I garnered from the kickstarter updates:

Ch:1 ???: in editing - I assume this is an introduction or in-setting fiction.
Ch:2 Setting: in editing
Ch:3 Character Creation: in editing - I'm a little fuzzy on this since they gave a preview of Ch:9 character creation, but I think they meant antagonists there.
Ch:4 ??? Charms? I don't think they said what chapter charms are part of yet. Charms were sighted as needing a major overhaul back in late August '13, and since they've been giving updates on individual charm trees. I looked on the 'what we know so far' wiki, but I didn't see a master list of charm trees, or if they where dropping some skills in favor of others; for example, they mention brawl charms, but is that a skill that's different from Martial Arts? I don't think it is.

-Archery: done
-Melee: done
-Martial Arts: done, this was the only 'combat' skill that was mentioned as still needing tweaks after playtesting
-Thrown: done
-War: done
-Brawl?: done

-Integrity: in development
-Presence: in development, near completion
-Performance: done
-Resistance: done
-Survival: done

-Craft: no info
-Investigation: no info
-Lore: in development?
-Medicine: no info
-Occult: no info, other than it's not directly tied to sorcery. Sorcery is it's own thing and doesn't function off of Occult charms.

-Athletics: in editing
-Awareness: done
-Dodge: they didn't mention this tree specifically, but gave a 'visualization preview' and I assume it's done because it's part of the combat engine
-Larceny: no info
-Stealth: no info

-Bureaucracy: no info
-Linguistics: no info
-Ride: done
-Sail: no info, but some preview charms were released.
-Socialize: no info on its progress, but they said it was the first charm tree they'd work on for the social engine, so I assume it's at least ready for playtesting (ie: done).

Ch:5 Traits: in editing
Ch:? Equipment: 1/2 in editing (the equipment portion) and 1/2 being developed (the excellency portion).
Ch:6-8: no info
Ch:9 Antagonists: first draft done for playtesting, but I got the feeling that it wasn't quite "done." As in they have some sample threats to get the playtesters started but not the complete chapter.
Ch:9+ I don't know how many chapters the book is supposed to have.

Combat Engine: In editing
Social Engine: Overhaul complete, ready for playtesting
Sorcery Engine: Second pass

As far as the playtesting goes, they're in phase 2...which could really mean anything: "Execute order sixty-six!" Back in September they mentioned that the sorcery engine overhaul was the last major hurdle that they anticipated, but again that's only useful as relative information. There's info in there too about the novels are in the pitch/outline phase and that the comic is sketched out and now being written and illustrated. And that's what I gathered from the updates.

Stranger Danger

They keep a more up to date thread on the Onyx Path forums here: http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/exalted/44313-someone-asked-for-a-list-of-what-s-been-finished-in-another-thread-so-here

What's currently in progress:

Okamigrif wrote:

26/8/2013 charms being rewritten
09/9/2013 stealth charms internal playtesting, ch. 3 and 5 in editing
16/9/2013 Athletics charms internal playtesting
25/9/2013 Awareness charms wrapping up, religion and finance sections in editing. Evocations in progress. All Essence pool calculations and Ox Body Tech arrays for all hardbacks done.

30/9/2013 Awareness charms complete. This finishes up Night Caste charms. Wyld and Fair Folk section in editing.
08/10/2013 Dawn Caste charms wrapping up. Martial Arts and Evocations almost done.
14/10/2013 Social Engine is in editing.
22/10/2013 Melee is done, Archery almost finished. Traits Chapter entirely getting into editing.
29/10/2013 Archery Done. Brawl/Martial Arts/Thrown getting attention.
05/11/2013 Thrown almost done. Chapter one almost done. Chapter 4:Traits almost 100% to editing.
11/11/2013 no update save for chapters being finalized for editing. (CBF)
18/11/2013 Resistance is done. Playtesting with closely known groups (CBF)
27/11/2013 Survival is down (CBF)
02/12/2013 Martial arts done. War, Ride, Survival, Resistance done.
09/12/2013 Sail done, lore in progress.(CBF)
16/12/2013 Sorcery is being worked on to get to editing. Lore tabled to start on Social charms, Socialize first. (CBF)
31/12/2013 no update
06/01/2014 Socialize done, Presence and Performance being worked. Sorcery being worked to get to editing. Playtesting now has War and Social systems
23/01/2014 Presence is finished, Performance being worked on. Edits coming back and being implemented. Leadership system and merits being finalized, Storytelling going to edit. Antagonists being tweaked, art notes being compiled.
26/01/2014 Performance is done.
28/01/2014 Performance done, Integrity being worked on. Social Engine is done unless playtesters discover new issues. Settings organized to be sent to editing later in the week. Martial Arts being revised,
04/02/2014 Integrity is finished and Linguistics is up next. Chapter 2 ( Setting) is finished, Sorcery rules are being revised.

13/1/2014 (KS update) Presence almost finished, Performance heavily being worked on. Sorcery undergoing second draft,elements of Traits chapter being set to editing.

11/02/2014 Linguistics is down, Athletics are being retooled due to movement actions. After Athletics is redone, Investigation will be started. Soon social charms will be sent to playtesters. "Example of character creation" part of Chapter 3 has been sent to editing, because, quote "there is finally enough of a body of completed Charms to do that section."


Book progress breakdown as readily stolen from Tiresias's hard work!

Chapter 1: The Exalted is in simultaneous editing and art direction.
Chapter 2: Setting is written prepped for editing.
Chapter 3: Character Creation is/was in editing.
Chapter 4: Traits is/was in editing.
Chapter 5: Systems and Drama had the combat and social engine go through editing. Investigation and medicine systems have been written.
Chapter 6: Charms has all combat charms written and possibly Lore as well.
Chapter 7: Martial Arts and Sorcery has all martial arts written.
Chapter 8: Storytelling is prepping for editing currently status unknown.
Chapter 9: Antagonists is being tweaked.
Chapter 10: Equipment and Wonders has all Evocations written, which means most if not all Artifacts are written. Hearthstones are probably written.

Solar

Given that they are currently running through the beta playtest with their larger playtest group, they are presumably sorted with the vast majority of the game, all the core systems certainly. The non-combat charms and additional sub-systems like sorcery seem to be the last bits to finish and then everything will at least be in playtesting.

Once that happens, month or so finishing that off? Month tying things up afterwards? It's been a long wait but it definitely looks like we are nearing the close of play on the core.

Ardent

Auralynx wrote: »

Grey Paladin wrote: »

The art style looks neat. I just hope the mechanics are decent. When even WotC beats you on the balance front you are kind of in trouble.

Yeah, Exalted was a giant mechanical disaster. Everything people liked about White Wolf, particularly W:tA, plus everything they didn't all bundled up into one awkward mess with really cool flavor.

After listening to Holden pontificate (he's the mechanics side of the dev-duo) I am fairly certain Exalted 3E will be just like 2E. It will look really great in the core rulebook and then fall apart completely by the fourth or fifth supplement. Then it will be played for 10 years by a committed group of people who basically re-write the game to make it functional.