Exalted 3E - We're All Exalted Fans Here - The Something Awful Forums

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Bedlamdan: Apr 25, 2008

Kenlon posted:

We never got a revised Abyssal preview that would help show that the writers had understood the problems with the first one, for example.

No, we got an update in the kickstarter talking about the preview which said 'the ghosts are special effects, there's no raping that was never our intent' which really only served to make things worse.

# ? Feb 5, 2014 18:18

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# ? May 29, 2024 10:45

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

I want mechanics previews as much as everyone else, but I'd rather the developers fix problems like BP/XP that have been actually confirmed to exist but have been portrayed as being equal in importance to Raksi's baby eating.

# ? Feb 5, 2014 18:21

Mikan: Sep 5, 2007; by Radium

Attorney at Funk posted:

Like you're doing really well as a PR guy to a group of people many of whom'd be happy to just call you a turdbrain and leave it at that.

This keeps getting pushed around and I don't think it's true - there are people here with legitimate concerns about the project who want to know what's up, but we don't have any information to go on and kept getting told "oh it's awesome you just have to trust us, now here's a thing that shows why you shouldn't trust us at all: " or complete silence.
The way StephenLS is presenting SA as some kind of endless negativity hive is lovely PR and only serves to drive away people who are enthusiastic about the project. If people didn't care about Exalted or wanted to create an "echo chamber" (thanks for that, by the way, it's a great way to dismiss concerns of paying and potential customers) they wouldn't be actively trying to engage with the developers and learn about all the cool ways the system's been fixed but we can't know about.

# ? Feb 5, 2014 18:23

Stephenls: Feb 21, 2013; [REDACTED]

Bedlamdan posted:

Kenlon, they have about 300 separate playtest groups giving them feedback right now, speaking as yet another person involved with a group of playtesters. They've got enough people giving them opinions on the game that they can reasonably sort out, and some of these people have absolutely no reason to shill for the game. They've got all the feedback they can reasonably sort through already, and a Pathfinder style Open Beta is going to do gently caress-all in terms of sorting out useful feedback from the white noise.

Yeah, that, too. I think it was about two months ago that Holden came to me one Friday looking for sympathy because the playtesters discovered that SUBSYSTEM, which looked good on paper, implodes when used in conjunction with ACTION, and he was all like "If I can't figure out how to reconcile this I'll need to rewrite SUBSYSTEM from the ground up, and I would rather kill myself than do that." And I said "Oh, yeah, and I guess it'd mean you'd have to fix about half the charms for ABILITY, too, wouldn't it? Sucks to be you! Glad I'm just the copyeditor!" (Which is of course code for "My deepest sympathies, let me know if I can help with anything.")

Next week I asked him how it was going and he was all "I am rewriting SUBSYSTEM. Kill me."

But that was two months ago and now it's fixed.

If all goes well you will never know which system I'm talking about, which action, which ability, which Charms. Book'll come out and it'll all just work.

Last week I spend about four hours every morning before my full-time office job editing the gently caress out of chapter 2. You will notice Rich called chapter 2 out as complete in the latest Monday update.

(Fallout of that system rewrite was a Facebook post Holden wrote, which I will quote here because it's interesting.)

quote:

I'm gonna ramble about my work over the last year. Warning: Long.

Here's one of the major design challenges of Exalted that isn't immediately clear to most people, and indeed wasn't clear to me until I'd been working on it for a while:

If you're doing it right, especially if you're rebuilding the core engine, you cannot make any assumptions, you can't implement any unexamined solutions, and you can't treat anything as an ancillary element. Everything has to be questioned, and there are no parts of the system that aren't important. This means a lot of extra work.

You might think those are universal game design axioms, or, failing that, just inflated statements of self-importance ("ALL the system elements are important!" sounds like blowing hot air, and in most systems, it would be). They're not. You can afford to make assumptions and just toss down certain old solutions without thinking about them too hard in, say, all the 20th anniversary World of Darkness books, or even in the new God-Machine nWoD books. That's not a slam on them, just a design truism-- did the rules for driving a car work okay for Vampire: the Masquerade 2nd edition? Yes? Then they'll work fine for V:tM Revised and V20. "They work" is all you really need out of them, they're not vital. If they work, they'll also probably work fine for Werewolf, Mage, Changeling, Demon, etc. Unless we're making Transformers: the RPG with a tight focus on car chases, those rules, written 23 years ago, will probably continue to work fine. They're an edge case that gets the job done on the occasions they come up: We're going to lose the cops, roll the dice, moment of exciting tension, cops evaded, next scene.

See also: shadowing people, carousing, climbing, and putting on a disguise. Likewise, when updating nWoD to God-Machine, none of these were load-bearing system elements that needed a lot of careful examination, allowing more time to be spent on crucial stuff like character advancement, combat, social interaction, and supernatural powers. This is, in fact, one of nWoD's strengths: there's a simple central mechanism that everything hooks onto. It makes things fast, fun, and easy, and these are the game's cardinal virtues. It neither needs nor wants a bunch of crunchy intricacies.

The point where Exalted differs from other Onyx Path/Storyteller games is that its supernatural powers hook directly to the game's Abilities, and are designed to reach in and monkey around with any and all mechanics deriving from those Abilities. (Other Exalt-types attach to the Attributes, meaning that at the end of the day, absolutely everything in the system is potential Charm fodder.) And we've got at least ten books reaching in to take a turn interacting with these mechanics. Anything that doesn't offer much to the Charms will quickly become a liability, as it forces repetitive effects across different Charm sets, or just denies us much-needed room to focus and differentiate between character types.

(Again: Not only are the other Storyteller/Storytelling games not put together this way, you wouldn't *want them to be.* Virtual Adepts might benefit from more rigorous hacking rules, but nobody else does-- being able to just shrug and go "roll Intelligence + Computers, difficulty 8" is one of the core benefits of the system.)

Bottom line: Every single rule in the system has to be rigorous and interesting enough to hang 20+ Charms from it. They're all load-bearing rules. This increases the design workload on the core engine and the time it takes to do it right by several orders of magnitude relative to say, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, which is probably Exalted's closest mechanical cousin. (When I was writing the Gifts for W20 and W20 Changing Breeds, I routinely ran ctrl+F searches for "Charm," because I had a tendency to slip up and call the Gifts that. The skillset for writing the two is very similar. p.s. get Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition, it is awesome.)

The payoff is... well, pretty soon everyone will get to experience the payoff. The playtesters seem to feel the extra work and time has been worth it.

# ? Feb 5, 2014 18:27

Attorney at Funk: Jun 3, 2008; ...the person who says honestly that he despairs is closer to being cured than all those who are not regarded as despairing by themselves or others.

Mikan posted:

This keeps getting pushed around and I don't think it's true - there are people here with legitimate concerns about the project who want to know what's up, but we don't have any information to go on and kept getting told "oh it's awesome you just have to trust us, now here's a thing that shows why you shouldn't trust us at all: " or complete silence.
The way StephenLS is presenting SA as some kind of endless negativity hive is lovely PR and only serves to drive away people who are enthusiastic about the project. If people didn't care about Exalted or wanted to create an "echo chamber" (thanks for that, by the way, it's a great way to dismiss concerns of paying and potential customers) they wouldn't be actively trying to engage with the developers and learn about all the cool ways the system's been fixed but we can't know about.

Oh, I wasn't trying to make a social or cultural statement on the negativity of SA. I was speaking personally. I, myself, am happy to be gleefully dismissive of and rude to RPG writers, you turdbrain.

# ? Feb 5, 2014 18:28

NIV3K: Jan 8, 2010

I feel like part of the issue is that it's been very unclear how far along the Core Book truly is. The two Socialize charm previews were released more than a year ago now. At that time people felt that the book must be coming close to completion. After all, charms end up being one of the last concurrent parts written for the book since they need so many of the systems in place before they are written.

In truth, the book was nowhere near complete. Since then large portions of the charm section have been rewritten at least twice if not more. When people were telling them to put up previews of charms during the KS they couldn't because they had nothing to show.

People thought that the Ex3 KS was like other WW KSs in that the product was nearly complete and the only reason there was a KS was to find the Deluxe Edition. And while that is the stated goal of the KS, the book wasn't in a similar state of completion. The lack of transparency in the design process and progress for the entire haul has led to people feeling like this will never be released or that something is catastrophically wrong if it's taking this long.

Realize that a year ago we saw two Socialize Charms, and at this point we are now approaching the Social Influence play testing. That disparity is a large part of the issue.

# ? Feb 5, 2014 18:30

Kenlon: Jun 27, 2003; Digitus Impudicus

Bedlamdan posted:

Kenlon, they have about 300 separate playtest groups giving them feedback right now, speaking as yet another person involved with a group of playtesters. They've got enough people giving them opinions on the game that they can reasonably sort out, and some of these people have absolutely no reason to shill for the game. They've got all the feedback they can reasonably sort through already, and a Pathfinder style Open Beta is going to do gently caress-all in terms of sorting out useful feedback from the white noise.

They don't have to try to listen to all the discussion that would come from opening the text up to backers FATE Core or Demon: The Descent style. The writers can keep listening to the playtesters for 99% of the feedback, and use the larger context to understand how people are viewing the game. Not to mention that it would turn those 300 groups into a counterbalance to the "it's all gonna suck!" since they could give examples from actual play. Not to mention all of us who would immediately start games using said preview, and if it's good we'd sure as hell say so. . .

Bedlamdan posted:

No, we got an update in the kickstarter talking about the preview which said 'the ghosts are special effects, there's no raping that was never our intent' which really only served to make things worse.

Which only emphasizes the problems with trying to manage public opinion by giving little dribbles of information.

# ? Feb 5, 2014 18:31

Mikan: Sep 5, 2007; by Radium

I don't think we even need a full preview at this point, just more open and honest communication from the developers and less blaming the community for a "negative tone" about third edition. If they want to keep the actual game under wraps, whatever, that's fine. Dribbling out previews of inconsequential stuff mixed in with hype and treating paying/potential customers like children is only going to keep souring people on the book before it releases.

# ? Feb 5, 2014 18:36

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Stephenls posted:

Yeah, that, too. I think it was about two months ago that Holden came to me one Friday looking for sympathy because the playtesters discovered that SUBSYSTEM, which looked good on paper, implodes when used in conjunction with ACTION, and he was all like "If I can't figure out how to reconcile this I'll need to rewrite SUBSYSTEM from the ground up, and I would rather kill myself than do that." And I said "Oh, yeah, and I guess it'd mean you'd have to fix about half the charms for ABILITY, too, wouldn't it? Sucks to be you! Glad I'm just the copyeditor!" (Which is of course code for "My deepest sympathies, let me know if I can help with anything.")

Next week I asked him how it was going and he was all "I am rewriting SUBSYSTEM. Kill me."

But that was two months ago and now it's fixed.

If all goes well you will never know which system I'm talking about, which action, which ability, which Charms. Book'll come out and it'll all just work.

Last week I spend about four hours every morning before my full-time office job editing the gently caress out of chapter 2. You will notice Rich called chapter 2 out as complete in the latest Monday update.

(Fallout of that system rewrite was a Facebook post Holden wrote, which I will quote here because it's interesting.)

You can't make any assumptions! Everything has to be questioned! I mean, except for keeping the entire 2E attribute/skill list, therefore ensuring that there are thirty four different character traits each of which needs a huge Charm tree.

# ? Feb 5, 2014 18:36

Adept Nightingale: Feb 7, 2005

Yeah, I don't at all suppose that the public at large is a good study group for specific feedback, because opinions will run the gamut-- I'm just a PR professional, and this walled garden approach is painful to watch. If SA has become a negative community for Exalted (and SA got me interested in Exalted in the first place, so I don't at all think that was always the case), it is a result of your approach, not some failing of the fanbase.

# ? Feb 5, 2014 18:36

Stephenls: Feb 21, 2013; [REDACTED]

Ferrinus posted:

You can't make any assumptions! Everything has to be questioned! I mean, except for keeping the entire 2E attribute/skill list, therefore ensuring that there are thirty four different character traits each of which needs a huge Charm tree.

No, we questioned those.

# ? Feb 5, 2014 18:38

Attorney at Funk: Jun 3, 2008; ...the person who says honestly that he despairs is closer to being cured than all those who are not regarded as despairing by themselves or others.

Nightskye posted:

Yeah, I don't at all suppose that the public at large is a good study group for specific feedback, because opinions will run the gamut-- I'm just a PR professional, and this walled garden approach is painful to watch. If SA has become a negative community for Exalted (and SA got me interested in Exalted in the first place, so I don't at all think that was always the case), it is a result of your approach, not some failing of the fanbase.

I think SA is the negative community for Exalted compared to the White Wolf Forums and RPGNet, which, you know... fair cop, relatively speaking. I'll take actual criticism even when it's over the line before Exalted (+) and a treatise on why Homestuck is more of an epic than Gilgamesh.

# ? Feb 5, 2014 18:43

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Stephenls posted:

No, we questioned those.

You totally didn't, come on now. There's obviously huge redundancy in the skill list and coming up with the equivalent of detailed, crunchy computer hacking rules for twenty five different skills is a waste of both your and our time. No doubt you've since come up with charm trees that make Presence, Performance, and Socialize genuinely different from each other, but those charm trees could easily sprout from only two social skills or even only one.

# ? Feb 5, 2014 18:45

Bedlamdan: Apr 25, 2008