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Eh, I guess at the very least it won't be worse than 2e. If the system is at least playable, I'll be kinda happy. And if it still sucks, I'll just play Fate or DW. That said, I didn't drop 300$ for a gold plated book. What is it about Wuxia games that makes them fail somehow? WotG was the best one and even that had a lot of issues and a convulted system that was a pain in the rear end to grasp. LoW seems like it died after they released the PDF, Qin is pretty decent but I don't think anyone plays it, and Exalted is Exalted.
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Jun 4, 2014 08:20
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I dunno if a white wolf book having a release date of "fuckin, whenever" is really a thing worthy of surprise, much less melodrama
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Jun 4, 2014 11:20
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Personally I was introduced to Exalted with 2.5, and only heard about 3E way after the Kickstarter finished, midway through my own first campaign. I figure it'll come out when it comes out, basically, while holding some hope that the mechanics have been improved. Exalted seems to benefit somewhat from having a group of relatively rookie tabletop gamers, incidentally (the only other games we fiddled with before was WHRPG and Dark Heresy). The mechanics are frustratingly hard to work out sometimes, but since we don't really have a huge amount of basis for comparison there's not the same level of  this thread sometimes displays. We don't know any better, aside from bitching that the Warhammer systems were a lot easier to work out!(Also one of these days I need to find and read this mythical 1E book the thread seems to obsess over. 2E seemed pretty decent to us, mostly, so it'd be interesting to see the comparison.)
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Jun 4, 2014 11:47
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1E has some nice fluff, even if it is a bit weird at times. Do you think every character should have a paragraph on their sexuality? 1E did. If you had to just try out one then Manacle & Coin or Blood & Salt are my two favorite and I don't think you can go wrong with either. Though that may be due to my long running feeling that the Exalted themselves are the less interesting bit of Creation. Oh and if you do go on a 1E binge don't read the Lunar's book. Just trust us on this one.
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Jun 4, 2014 11:59
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Hugoon Chavez posted:What is it about Wuxia games that makes them fail somehow? I think it's the genre's obsession with 'techniques' and 'styles' being real things you can write down, steal, learn from other people, strong against some things weak against others, etc. It strongly encourages a game design where there's great big lists of techniques and styles, and then the whole thing implodes under it's own weight.
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Jun 4, 2014 12:41
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I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it. Wuxia games have come out and done pretty well. Feng Shui was fun, Legends of the Wulin was great and Qin is a good game. Wuxia just ain't as popular as Western Fantasy. Exalted is more kitchen sink than Wuxia anyway, it has Wuxia in it but it has everything in it, Conan, Aztecs, Gothic Horror, Sci Fi/Steam Punk Communist Robots it doesn't really give a poo poo about sticking to one thing.
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Jun 4, 2014 12:59
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Dammit Who? posted:I dunno if a white wolf book having a release date of "fuckin, whenever" is really a thing worthy of surprise, much less melodrama I think people've just sort of run out of other stuff to talk about.
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Jun 4, 2014 15:37
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Attorney at Funk posted:I think people've just sort of run out of other stuff to talk about. Well, OK, here's a topic of conversation for you: This thread is endlessly singing the praises of 1E while at the same time denouncing 2E in the most ringing of terms. As someone who only knows 2E and who rather liked it, can someone explain to me why 1E was so amazing and why 2E was so terrible?
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Jun 4, 2014 15:54
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Tomn posted:Well, OK, here's a topic of conversation for you: Exalted 2e is like what you'd get if you let the editors at Wookieepedia write the next Star Wars movie.
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Jun 4, 2014 16:00
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Dammit Who? posted:I dunno if a white wolf book having a release date of "fuckin, whenever" is really a thing worthy of surprise, much less melodrama I think people would generally be more understanding if the Exalted team had been more communicative and brought backers in to see the process or playtest or anything. Folks have been getting a lot of silence aside from the occasionally vague reassurance, and compared to any other gaming kickstarter I've backed, the post-Kickstarter treatment has been pretty disappointing.
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Jun 4, 2014 16:12
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Ratoslov posted:I think it's the genre's obsession with 'techniques' and 'styles' being real things you can write down, steal, learn from other people, strong against some things weak against others, etc. It strongly encourages a game design where there's great big lists of techniques and styles, and then the whole thing implodes under it's own weight. You have just described a core element of most big tablegames, and RPGs in general. Bloating of spell/feat/advantage lists is a big design problem in those other RPGs too, but it's not something unique to any one genre.
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Jun 4, 2014 16:20
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I may not be feverishly jerking off about how amazing Exalted 3e is going to be, but I'm still looking forward to owning and reading it. I don't think we're exactly in a miasma of ultimate despair.
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Jun 4, 2014 16:33
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Tomn posted:Well, OK, here's a topic of conversation for you: Exalted 1E had quite a few flaws to be honest (some of which are debatable depending on who you talk to) but it hit quite a few marks as well. The system was still wonky, there's no real way to get around that, though at the time a game that straight-up rewarded you mechanically for doing poo poo in increasingly crazy ways was pretty innovative. The fluff and setting were a breath of fresh air in a hobby where fantasy generally means "pseudo-medieval European pastiche" and it was also a game that at least flirted with the concept of PCs with tremendous world-shaking power and the consequences thereof rather than "wandering adventurers slowly rising in power" or even more traditional supers gaming which generally tried to emulate western comics. But it still had its flaws, both mechanically and fluff-wise. 1E Lunars was the worst of both worlds, terrible mechanics mated to terrible fluff including some eyebrow-raising sidebars on things like rape and breeding your own army of beastmen, and character advice that included things like "choose different weapons to differentiate your character." Charm trees were full of speedbumps, especially the earlier ones, and the system had all the classic White Wolf foibles like chargen/actual play XP cost splits, combat was less "high-flying wuxia action" and more "chipping away at boulders," the Fair Folk book suffered from a severe lack of user-friendliness (and the Sidereals book as well to a slightly lesser extent), the Abyssals hardback kicks things off with a story about a guy having a wet dream that was frankly not really needed, the cover to Savant & Sorcery, etc. etc. etc. So Exalted 1E was a very White Wolf game in that it was a mixture of some really cool and evocative ideas (and some glimmers of brilliance on the mechanical side) and some really whiffed execution and fluff ideas that probably seemed a lot cooler in the writers' heads then they actually were on paper. It was absolutely a game that would have benefited from a new edition to straighten the bugs out. What 2nd Edition did was shuffle the system around in a way that didn't really fix anything and in fact made a number of things worse, then take all the fluff and worldbuilding and systematically bury all of it under a thick layer of exhaustive, self-indulgent, and unnecessary detail as well as a fetish for magitech (which was a thing that 1E had lightly touched up, the wondrous sorcery of the First Age occasionally being indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology, but if you were to go by 2E then the First Age was basically Eclipse Phase by way of Gundam). There were books with blatant copy-paste issues (2E Dragonbloods springs to mind) and books where the writers found other exiting ways to mess with things (2E Sidereals where apparently the reorganization of the charm trees sort of hosed a bunch of stuff up) and books where the writers stuck their child rape fetish porn in the opening fiction and nobody said anything. Here's an example of the changes between 1E and 2E Exalted. In 1E you had Desus who basically existed as sort of a funny little mythology in-joke (he was basically intended to be Odysseus) and an example of what a Solar who wasn't really concerned with much but personal glory might look like. He was kind of a jerk as illustrated by the story of him punching a giant cyclopean lighthouse dude in the eye, breaking it, and there was some stuff that implied that his past life self was also a jerk too. In 2E Desus was a sociopathic rear end in a top hat who beat his spouse Lilith so badly she miscarried, brainwashed her into thinking it was her own fault, was strongly implied to have done a bunch of other heinous poo poo to her, and was generally turned into an over-the-top caricature complete with rendering Lilith a post-traumatic wreck a thousand years later. Desus and Lilith were presented as the primary example of what a Solar/Lunar couple might look like. Have fun!
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Jun 4, 2014 16:41
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Tomn posted:Well, OK, here's a topic of conversation for you: Kai has a pretty good summary so I'll speak of a comparison that I found to be, at least, somewhat in 2E's favor. 1E introduced areas of the game's setting through books that were focused on specific zones or cultures, such as the Scavenger Sons and whatever-it-was-of Halta (I did not have much chance to buy 1E books). Leaving aside the near-universal "here's a paragraph on what this local ruler/sample NPC likes to sleep with" thing, these were often evocative narratively. They were also often strewn around the books, because it was kind of an accretive process. 2E organized the setting books in a more modular way. Each major region of Creation, or significant chunk of cosmic alternate-space, got a softcover supplement that described it in more detail. This usually included the stuff from 1E, but also expanded on things; sometimes ridiculously or disgustingly, and sometimes with clever (the Denziks) or awesome (sharkdad) new narrative or creative elements. Perhaps most importantly, things were relatively contained: if you wanted the book on the North, it was easily found and generally fairly comprehensive, as opposed to being sprawled over half a dozen other supplements. In general, when you excise the gross fetish fiction, I found 2E better organized than 1E, and I think that is a pretty real value if you're actually gaming. Even things like Excellencies (which I gather are just being rolled into normal Charms now or something?) used to be 'different abilities have highly specific and eccentric dice-adding Charms, and oops maybe we forgot to give you one for Thrown or something'.
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Jun 4, 2014 17:58
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Kai Tave posted:So Exalted 1E was a very White Wolf game In a nutshell. Like the oWoD, it was filled with some obvious passion, a cool setting, and it was excitingly shiny and new. Also exactly like the oWoD, the mechanics were terrible (just as bad as 2E), a lot of the material presented wasn't really gameable, there was a lot of terrible fiction, nobody remembers the mediocre bits, the thing had more than a touch of juvenilia to it, and it's acquired a giant coat of nostalgic paint as time goes on. It's just really unfortunate that Exalted 2E didn't make the same jump that the nWoD did.
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Jun 4, 2014 18:11
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Dammit Who? posted:I dunno if a white wolf book having a release date of "fuckin, whenever" is really a thing worthy of surprise, much less melodrama I'm pretty selective, but I kicked $200 to the Exalted 3E Kickstarter because I played a lot of 2E, never bought any of the books (used the books of others in my playgroup), hoped 3E would be an improvement, and figured I owed it to Exalted given how much I'd played it without buying anything. Also, I really wanted my first character to ride around on a giant ground sloth (I bought in at the "pick a prehistoric animal to add stats for to the base book" level). That being said, when I contribute to a Kickstarter, I go in hoping I'll get something awesome, on time. What I expect, however, is to get something, eventually; if it's awesome, great. If it's late, whatever. I don't see any reason to sit around obsessing over every delay in development, doubly so when it's a process notorious for being delayed (PnP RPG development), triply so when it's from White Wolf. It'll get here when it gets here, and I hope it's awesome, but I don't really see the need to be treated like I'm sitting in at the writers' meetings or some poo poo; I'd rather they spend their time working on the product than updating me, anyhow.
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Jun 4, 2014 18:14
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Nessus posted:To some extent, because 1E was no longer being published and couldn't hurt you any more, I reckon. It also was the First Exposure for a lot of people, and therefore gained a patina of magic. This is what I have always assumed when people tell me about how awesome 1E was. They say stuff like '2E sucked because they released the compass books and that was all that existed in that Direction and it was horrible', but the idea I don't have to read through 3 or 4 different books to get a handful of useful areas is good. I've never seen anything particularly wonderful about 1E as far as I can tell, and often get annoyed with people praising it as the greatest thing ever while making GBS threads all over you for mostly playing 2E. Not that I'm saying that that's what happens on this forum, rather I've had that problem with other groups of people.
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Jun 4, 2014 18:22
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Stallion Cabana posted:This is what I have always assumed when people tell me about how awesome 1E was. They say stuff like '2E sucked because they released the compass books and that was all that existed in that Direction and it was horrible', but the idea I don't have to read through 3 or 4 different books to get a handful of useful areas is good. I've never seen anything particularly wonderful about 1E as far as I can tell, and often get annoyed with people praising it as the greatest thing ever while making GBS threads all over you for mostly playing 2E. As for the other thing, well, edition wars are a common flaw in this hobby in general.
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Jun 4, 2014 18:26
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Stallion Cabana posted:This is what I have always assumed when people tell me about how awesome 1E was. They say stuff like '2E sucked because they released the compass books and that was all that existed in that Direction and it was horrible', but the idea I don't have to read through 3 or 4 different books to get a handful of useful areas is good. I've never seen anything particularly wonderful about 1E as far as I can tell, and often get annoyed with people praising it as the greatest thing ever while making GBS threads all over you for mostly playing 2E. For me the thing that makes 2E suck in comparison to 1E is that a new edition of an RPG is ostensibly a chance to refine what worked in the previous edition, fix what didn't, and generally tighten things up and make them better overall, and Exalted 2E pretty much didn't do any of that. While I don't think it's entirely unfair to say that 1E gets the benefit of nostalgia, it was also the game's first foray into existence and so (speaking only for myself here) I'm willing to extend a little bit more benefit of the doubt even when I look at stuff that clearly doesn't work (the system) or is dumb and bad (Lunars) and say "yeah this stuff sucks, but hopefully they'll fix this poo poo when the new edition comes around." Y'know, learn from past experiences and all that. If you then go on to release a second edition that doesn't fix the obviously broken stuff and adds even more dumb and bad poo poo in the process, then yeah, I'm not going to extend that benefit of the doubt anymore.
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Jun 4, 2014 21:32
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I missed 1e in its entirety and didn't really get into Exalted until sometime after Infernals, so when I went back to look at 1e I was left with the following impressions: 1. Games of Divinty, Scavenger Sons, and The Sidereals are really, really good. 2. The basic mechanics are, if anything, even worse than 2e. 3. As much as 50% of the rest of the line was composed almost literally of Exalted fan-fiction. It's apparently easy to forget, looking back, that for every decent setting beat or story in the 1st edition there were at least three chapters worth of Aspect Book: Foo or Caste Book: Bar regaling you with the sex lives of some random House Cynis dynast or the angsty life of a wandering Solar mercenary. It was very, VERY White Wolf.
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Jun 5, 2014 00:59
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So who was working on this game in the beginning and who is left working on it now? I've tried to get a sense of things by going to the website and that just seemed to waste a good deal of time, and having gone through this thread all I can figure out is that Stephenls is development team PR champion having stuck it out here for over a hundred pages. I have the impression that the structure of this game's creation is very different from the other project's that Onyx Path has put out.
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Jun 5, 2014 10:29
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The other thing that made the 1e era better for me was that the line developer was still involved - GCG was regularly communicating with the fanbase about the intention behind the game, and he clearly had a specific vision for what Exalted was all about. There was a different line developer for 2e, and he was pretty much missing in action http://exalted.xi.co.nz/wiki/Thus_Spake_Zargrabowski and http://exalted.xi.co.nz/wiki/Thus_Spake_Zaraborgstrom are still great reads. GCG THIRTEEN YEARS AGO posted:Making mystical assets -- especially incredibly important assets like Generation and Avatar -- into something that you have to buy just makes them a first time chargen landmine. Lots and lots of critical Background choices make each character weaker (the same way long skill lists make every character dumber) and increases the chance you will forget something you Absolutely Must Have during chargen (also exactly like long skill lists). Also, it's my opinion that the elements of chargen should be fairly discreet, and so I tried to confine Backgrounds to social intangibles and keep the innate powers in the Charms where they belong.
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Jun 6, 2014 03:38
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We tend to draw a line between First Edition and Second for obvious reasons, but mid to late 1e was very much the onset of 2e.Attorney at Funk posted:Exalted 2e is like what you'd get if you let the editors at Wookieepedia write the next Star Wars movie. Lioness fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Jun 6, 2014 |
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Jun 6, 2014 10:28
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Lioness posted:We tend to draw a line between First Edition and Second for obvious reasons, but mid to late 1e was very much the onset of 2e. darknessssss
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Jun 6, 2014 18:24
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Nessus posted:But early 1E might have had the seeds for mid/late 1E. Perhaps the product was born with its own corruptions, and the only texts we can rely upon were the early promo materials. All else is tainted with darkness! The Great Curse was inherent in Exalted from the beginning, you say?
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Jun 6, 2014 18:29
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Tomn posted:The Great Curse was inherent in Exalted from the beginning, you say? I'm thinking it's more like the Broken-Winged Crane: all of the current editions are flawed copies of the one true edition, which someone will write in the future.
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Jun 6, 2014 19:39
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Thanatosian posted:I'm thinking it's more like the Broken-Winged Crane: all of the current editions are flawed copies of the one true edition, which someone will write in the future. Which will bring on a thousand years of World of Darkness and release the Editors from their eternal Coffee-Break.
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Jun 6, 2014 22:10
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Ratoslov posted:Which will bring on a thousand years of World of Darkness and release the Editors from their eternal Coffee-Break. A thousand years? That's about 10 books, right?
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Jun 7, 2014 05:37
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Xelkelvos posted:A thousand years? That's about 10 books, right? Lioness fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Jun 7, 2014 |
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Jun 7, 2014 13:56
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The introduction of non-Creation venues for games in 1e basically ended my sustained interest in the game. Also, the recurrence of signature characters. Also, rpg dot net's enthusiasm for the game.
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Jun 7, 2014 14:57
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Lioness posted:Might still be better than the prequel trilogy, pretty sure we wouldn't have gotten the infamous "sand" dialogue. It's pretty much exactly the prequel trilogy actually.
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Jun 7, 2014 14:57
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Mexcillent posted:The introduction of non-Creation venues for games in 1e basically ended my sustained interest in the game. 
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Jun 7, 2014 17:40
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Nessus posted:So it ended at what, the Sidereals? Or did Abyssals come first? Abyssals was first, but Sidereals was the one that pissed me off more.
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Jun 7, 2014 17:47
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Mexcillent posted:Abyssals was first, but Sidereals was the one that pissed me off more.
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Jun 7, 2014 17:53
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Mexcillent posted:The introduction of non-Creation venues for games in 1e basically ended my sustained interest in the game. But the Non-Creation venues are basically the good ones? Malfeas, Autochthonia... I guess Creation is better than Heaven or the Underworld, but I never felt like Heaven was meant to be a setting where you can run a game purely in it. I guess you could, since there are campaigns that run purely inside things like Nexus, and Heaven is basically the world's largest city. That'd be a pretty fun game actually. Beat up gods and spirits in heaven, purge the corrupted via body slams. Kick people through windows and then piledrive them into pagoda's. Man I wanna play a Heaven based game now.
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Jun 7, 2014 19:59
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Nessus posted:How come? I can also see how the Underworld would be less of a pain in the dick than Heaven, the Underworld was sort of a baked in assumption from day 1 in some fashion. Yeah that was exactly it. I signed onto a game about sword and sandals fantasy, and then all of a sudden there was a huge city in heaven which looked a lot more technologically advanced rather than just weird. The Underworld, for the degree that I disliked it, didn't have public transportation or other contemporary technology winks built into it. I think that it was because the E1 core had no hints that this stuff existed in the form that it ultimately took. I feel the same about Malfeas and Autocthon, that they are like the deep umbra in the oWoD, places that people who like to think about and "prep" games love but which have very little actual utility to running a game where you build empires, settle scores, tear apart kingdoms, etc. E: I also feel that they put down the seeds of the worst poo poo in 2e, the mechanization of all aspects of metaphysics, the weird magitech, etc. and that poo poo REALLY turned me off.
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Jun 8, 2014 17:02
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Started a new Exalted/D&D4 game last night. Our Heroes: a Night Caste solar with grimcleaver (avenger) a Half Moon lunar (druid) a Jade alchemical shipwright (warden) a Secrets sidereal martial artist (psion) a rogue Moonshadow abyssal (pacifist cleric) The game premise is 'sweet ice ski boats and kung fu', so far it's delivering!
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Jun 8, 2014 23:22
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Something about a night caste with a grimcleaver tickles me. The world's stealthiest axe murderer.
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Jun 9, 2014 00:18
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Mexcillent posted:Yeah that was exactly it. I signed onto a game about sword and sandals fantasy, and then all of a sudden there was a huge city in heaven which looked a lot more technologically advanced rather than just weird. The Underworld, for the degree that I disliked it, didn't have public transportation or other contemporary technology winks built into it. For me every game setting is about finding where the seeds of terrible poo poo have been planted and then weeding the garden until I have a setting that is fun for me and my players- I've never found a game where I can play it "exactly as written" and be comfortable doing so.
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Jun 9, 2014 02:24
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So, I'm joining a 2e game where any exalt type is allowed, and the storyteller thinks that 2.5 was poo poo and refuses to use it. How do I best break the system inorder to make an overpowered as heck character? My current concept fits anything except for Alchemical.
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Jun 9, 2014 04:14
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