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pospysyl posted:Yo what? Exalted's audience is a fraction of Dungeon and Dragons/Pathfinder's, and those willing to playtest material is a fraction of that. How is the d20 forum on the most popular tradgames forum at all representative of a backer playtest? Not only that but D20 has a notably fractitious player base who all think their edition was the best and all others horrible. Exalted is "lucky" in that rules wise nearly everyone agrees they were both horrible.
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Sep 23, 2014 15:29
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, if I could get a refund, I would. I actually tried. (No go, obviously - though I didn't expect it to work, so it's hardly a surprise.)
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Sep 23, 2014 15:42
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If you want to make the argument that they didn't do an open playtest because they didn't feel they could handle the feedback, then fine. I might disagree, but I can understand that reason as a justification. However, they stopped the regular playtest with their smaller group of individuals with only a single round of feedback for the "Mental" charms and never having released the rest of the MA Styles, Sorcery, Evocations, Merits, or general system mechanics like the Experience system. Based on the material already released for playtesting they definitely did not have to skill or experience to be able to just disregard playtesting feedback, so all that stuff I mentioned is likely going to be subpar at best. Likely they stopped it because of the leak, but that makes no sense because they should have had some method of determining who the leaker was and punishing them for breaching the NDA. So either they are petty and holding the rest of the playtesters accountable for one individuals action or they are arrogantly overconfident in their ability to churn out suitable material. Or maybe there's some other reason for this move that I didn't conceive of, but we wouldn't know because of all the secrecy.
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Sep 23, 2014 15:45
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Rand Brittain posted:See, now I'm looking at the d20 forum on RPGnet and considering what it would be like trying to sort through all that feedback to figure out how to make a better edition of D&D. Well, d20 is so much larger and messier than Exalted it's not even funny. That's like saying that you couldn't hike across France because man, you thought about hiking across Russia once and that's just too far. That being said, you can't absorb it all, but you do what you can. Also it's funny you should mention d20, because you remember who had an open playtest? Pathfinder! They didn't even have a kickstarter or a presale associated with it- they just did! In fact, they often have touted having "10,000 playtesters", though that's dubiously just based on the # of downloads they had on their beta rules. How much useful data did they get out of it? How much did they change in response to it? No idea. It may have been as much publicity stunt as playtest, but they at least threw their fans a bone. Pathfinder regularly does playtests for major releases, too. And they're free to everyone. Granted, they have a team that's about three to four times as big, but they're working with a game that's much bigger, too. They even let other people give out all their rules for every book for free. And they're an industry leader! Granted, it is possible to bungle an open playtest (those early D&D 5e drafts, for example), but part of the purpose of a playtest these days is not just for beep boop data get, but to invest your fans in the game. And the more invested they are, the more likely you are to get useful feedback in the first place. pospysyl posted:On the plus side, they've said that one of the goals is to have charms for all the splats written from the start so that they can be balanced against one another to prevent power creep. That was probably a terrible idea, but hopefully it means the other splat books come out faster. IIRC, more recently they said they haven't really gotten to any work associated with other Exalt types. I would suspect that'll be the last stuff they'd be working out to fill the antagonists section, but that's just a guess.
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Sep 23, 2014 16:25
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Excelsiortothemax posted:They had about 12% of a manuscript ready to go. It's better than 11%!
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Sep 23, 2014 19:01
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I barely remember the playtest doc. Did it have more Charms than the Ex2 core or was that some other game?
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Sep 23, 2014 19:06
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Fans posted:There was a bit of a one on RPG.net but it got jumped on pretty hard as soon as someone mentioned compensation. I'm not really sure where it'd start, most of the news goes up on RPG.net or Onyx Path so all the Exalted fans gravitate there, but you can't really start a riot without getting banned. Maybe a thread on RPG.net about failed kickstarters like Far West or Exalted would get some traction Just kidding, welcome to a world where GMS is the moderator on the biggest RPG discussion board and shuts down all those conversations.
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Sep 23, 2014 19:09
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Exalted doesn't have a failed kickstarter, it just has a really dysfunctional relationship between its fanbase and current writing team. I've got no doubt that it's coming out and will be good in the ways there's good reason to think it'll be good in.
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Sep 23, 2014 19:16
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The definition of "damning with faint praise" there Ferrinus. It doesn't matter if the game is the best thing since apple pie, their Kickstarter support was atrocious and if I ever buy another Exalted product it will be ONLY once it is on a shelf. Honestly you'd think when an industry is so dependent on consumer good will (because boy is it ever easy to pirate game PDFs) they wouldn't squander it like this.
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Sep 23, 2014 19:25
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Ferrinus posted:Exalted doesn't have a failed kickstarter, it just has a really dysfunctional relationship between its fanbase and current writing team. I've got no doubt that it's coming out and will be good in the ways there's good reason to think it'll be good in. I'm not seeing a distinction though? Far West doesn't have a failed kickstarter, it just has a really dysfunctional relationship between its fanbase (and everyone else on the internet) and its writing team. E: It's even coming out! Real soon! He promises! RPZip fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 19:27
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Dude, we've actually seen the playtest leak. We have the 1000something charms they've written there for perusal. It's stupid to pretend that Exalted is vaporware. "Doesn't care to finish writing Exalted" is not a problem with the existing Exalted writing team.
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Sep 23, 2014 19:35
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(Also, a Heptagram book would be boss, because it would basically be the book that's there so you can do PG13/R-rated Harry Potter with Dragon-Blooded sorcerers.)
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Sep 23, 2014 19:37
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Ferrinus posted:Dude, we've actually seen the playtest leak. We have the 1000something charms they've written there for perusal. It's stupid to pretend that Exalted is vaporware. "Doesn't care to finish writing Exalted" is not a problem with the existing Exalted writing team. One might say they're dying to finish it!
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Sep 23, 2014 19:50
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Ferrinus posted:Dude, we've actually seen the playtest leak. We have the 1000something charms they've written there for perusal. It's stupid to pretend that Exalted is vaporware. "Doesn't care to finish writing Exalted" is not a problem with the existing Exalted writing team. Emptyquoting.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:17
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Rand Brittain posted:They've been pretty explicit about why they didn't do an open playtest: because they don't have enough people overseeing the playtest to make hundreds of additional playtesters useful. Then you read the organizers' remarks, and shockingly enough it's way more filtered down! You can even give them some instructions - ignore remarks that aren't rooted in a campaign play context, focus on people talking about the overall feel of combat, ignore anyone who ever posted about Terrifying Argent Witches. If you can't possibly spare time from the exalted heights of your wordsmithy, peel off a couple K from your giant kickstarter roll and hire ONE guy to do the organizing here, minding the playtest people and so forth. Rand Brittain posted:(Also, a Heptagram book would be boss, because it would basically be the book that's there so you can do PG13/R-rated Harry Potter with Dragon-Blooded sorcerers.)
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Sep 23, 2014 20:17
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nrook posted:One might say they're dying to finish it! There is a man who is dying of a horrible cancer to make his elfgame and you are making this kind of horrible joke. I hope God has mercy on your soul, or more than you have for poor Morke.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:20
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nrook posted:One might say they're dying to finish it! Exalted: Soulsteel edition. Seriously though didn't Morke actually have some kind of successful surgery recently? I haven't been following it.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:21
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Yeah, he got his rebellious lymph node extracted and it was a complete success so far as I've heard.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:27
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Ferrinus posted:Exalted: Soulsteel edition. Seriously though didn't Morke actually have some kind of successful surgery recently? I haven't been following it.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:27
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ErichZahn posted:I barely remember the playtest doc. Did it have more Charms than the Ex2 core or was that some other game? It had close to 800 if I remember correctly, which is way more than the Ex2 Corebook.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:40
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Yeah, 3e seems to have a lot more Charms than 2e, although a lot of them are semi-redundant options like "reroll all your 7s" or "turn 9s into 0s" for people who like that kind of thing rather than the previous setup where mastery involved taking every single Charm in a tree.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:51
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Rand Brittain posted:Yeah, 3e seems to have a lot more Charms than 2e, although a lot of them are semi-redundant options like "reroll all your 7s" or "turn 9s into 0s" for people who like that kind of thing rather than the previous setup where mastery involved taking every single Charm in a tree. I mean that's what I'd do if I was playtesting these things, I'd come up with six or seven ways to do "roll thing better," and see how they shook out.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:55
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Nessus posted:It is also possible that these are ALL the Charms, and some of these will be dumped as bad ideas, or used for other splats later down the line, rather than the actual core book having nearly a thousand Charms. Yeah, by all accounts the stuff in the leak was quite early in the alpha, so I'd expect big changes to pretty much everything, especially the more experimental stuff like the crafting system.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:00
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I wouldn't, but it's not like the leak was bad or anything. There's a lot of cruft but that's clearly a top-down design choice as opposed to some sort of to-be-fixed-in-post oversight.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:05
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Ferrinus posted:I wouldn't, but it's not like the leak was bad or anything. There's a lot of cruft but that's clearly a top-down design choice as opposed to some sort of to-be-fixed-in-post oversight. Well, no, I wouldn't expect less, just different.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:08
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I would feel better about all those charms that do basically nothing except manipulate the end result of a roll if they didn't cost just as much as the actually interesting charms. As it stands a good 50% of the charms just feel like padding for padding's sake.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:10
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It is padding for padding's sake... but that's not crazy or incoherent or something. It's basically a way to make flat-costed Charms have increasingly marginal utility, so that a specialist advances more slowly than a generalist (but still advances, and therefore enjoys the comparatively-greater rewards of specialization). Petty Bullshit Reroll 3s If It's Tuesday Prana doesn't give you the same RoI as does Excellent Strike, but if you've bothered to buy both you are scarier to fight than someone who only has Excellent Strike. If your character really does want to do nothing more than completely and totally master the blade, they can, and they'll get some sort of measurable #value out of it.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:19
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The notion that Exalted needed more charms just proved to me that the inmates were running the asylum.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:31
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Ferrinus posted:Exalted doesn't have a failed kickstarter, it just has a really dysfunctional relationship between its fanbase and current writing team. I've got no doubt that it's coming out and will be good in the ways there's good reason to think it'll be good in. Depends on how you define "Failed" but I think a one year (and, come on, it's going to be more than that) delay is pretty drat close. I have no doubt that we'll eventually get Ex3. The guys working on it are pretty dedicated to it, and despise all of their horrible loving decisions since the beginning, at least they care about their brainchild. But from the eyes of the public, the kickstarter was a failure, since it was for an ex3 game for early 2014 and we didn't get it.
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Sep 24, 2014 08:12
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Hugoon Chavez posted:I have no doubt that we'll eventually get Ex3. The guys working on it are pretty dedicated to it, and despise all of their horrible loving decisions since the beginning, at least they care about their brainchild. But from the eyes of the public, the kickstarter was a failure, since it was for an ex3 game for early 2014 and we didn't get it. I honestly think people are not concerned about the time it took. Yes, it took a hell of a lot more time then their fairy tale dreams of 2 months, but I would totally be okay with it all if they just stepped back and updated us that, hey you know that system we planned isn't going to work. That, they will literally have to start from scratch. And then provide details in the kickstarter of what that meant as they went along. It's literally a process that takes near no time to get details for and share and be open. Kickstarters are inherently supposed to be open endeavors, though its never really forced. As a matter of fact we know through the Monday Meeting Notes (which I don't read, honestly and probably should be put in the Kickstarter as well) that editing is done. But what about the art? What about the book plans? What about the process of binding said book? What about preliminary sketches of the Deluxe version? Nothing. Not even a "Hey we haven't gotten to XYZ as of yet but its on the calendar". On a side note. Do you guys have any faith that we'll see a PDF this year? Hearing the editing is done gives me slight hope we may see it in October/November?
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Sep 24, 2014 09:00
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Bardlebee posted:I honestly think people are not concerned about the time it took. Yes, it took a hell of a lot more time then their fairy tale dreams of 2 months, but I would totally be okay with it all if they just stepped back and updated us that, hey you know that system we planned isn't going to work. That, they will literally have to start from scratch. And then provide details in the kickstarter of what that meant as they went along.
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Sep 24, 2014 09:04
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Bardlebee posted:I honestly think people are not concerned about the time it took. As long as a Kickstarter is open about the process and progress, I don't really care too much about time. But the more silence we get, the more chance I have to fret. Bardlebee posted:On a side note. Do you guys have any faith that we'll see a PDF this year? Hearing the editing is done gives me slight hope we may see it in October/November? Not even a little, I'm afraid. I hate to be a font of relentless negativity but I don't think we'll see it until it's ready to go to print, given the attitude of the design team. Unless it leaks again, mind.
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Sep 24, 2014 09:09
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Not even a little, I'm afraid. I hate to be a font of relentless negativity but I don't think we'll see it until it's ready to go to print, given the attitude of the design team. It just blows my mind, they got more then half a million dollars. Granted this money will heavily go into the products themselves, I understand that. But that should show that backing they have for this product and should not be worried about a PDF they send off as a complete product to be pirated. Literally I think everyone who probably wanted the book put into this Kickstarter and those who didn't will likely buy it to support it. Those who steal it are just going to steal it no matter what. That's just how it works.
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Sep 24, 2014 09:14
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Alien Rope Burn posted:The notion that Exalted needed more charms just proved to me that the inmates were running the asylum. The point where I ejected hope for the future game line didn't come with rape ghosts or the playtest leak, it came when Morke said that he wanted every character's daiklave to contain a larger charm tree than 2e core Solar melee got. That is a spergy bullshit event horizon beyond which I don't have the capacity to deal with. I'm sure the game will come out, eventually, and I'm sure that the base combat system will work much better than 2e's did (because it pretty much has to) but I'm also sure that, in terms of what I'd prefer the game to look like, it's not only jumped the rails but is now burning towards the horizon like a rocket sled.
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Sep 24, 2014 10:10
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For me the most disheartening thing for me isn't so much the time it has taken, as that is hardly unique to this game, its more along the line of they had garnered such good will and all of a sudden they put out that abyssal stuff with the rape ghosts who, if I am remembering correctly, are flung into oblivion with they fail to seduce/rape you. I pretty much regret funding this on those grounds, as they assured us that they were getting away from such things. I am a patient person for the most part, so the time does not bother me, but I have very little tolerance for stuff like the aforementioned ghosts. As much as I like the sort of Wuxia meets Conan of Cimmeria meets the Eternal Champion meets Berzerk vibe in the setting, I don't want even the option for charms that explicitly deal with rape.
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Sep 24, 2014 13:53
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On a positive note, the Quick Character blocks are looking very usable in today's "update".
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Sep 25, 2014 07:56
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Hugoon Chavez posted:On a positive note, the Quick Character blocks are looking very usable in today's "update". Plus, the entire book is now in editing and art development, which is exactly kind of the clear progress updates people have been asking for.
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Sep 25, 2014 10:22
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Bellicose Buddha posted:As much as I like the sort of Wuxia meets Conan of Cimmeria meets the Eternal Champion meets Berzerk vibe in the setting, I don't want even the option for charms that explicitly deal with rape. This is really the problem. Exalted is such a good idea at its core, but the places this team is taking it are pretty clearly stupid.
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Sep 25, 2014 16:25
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Exalted 3e: everything but the kitchen sink (+ rape)
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Sep 25, 2014 16:36
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Sexpansion posted:This is really the problem. Exalted is such a good idea at its core, but the places this team is taking it are pretty clearly stupid. Yeah, in hindsight, I can pretty clearly see that the Abyssalgate charms were aiming for "Be Lady Macbeth" but holy poo poo was the execution ever terrible. Seriously, I'd be all for a top-down mandate of 'no powers that exclusively key off of sex' because look how many problems go away when you do that. Old Kentucky Shark posted:The point where I ejected hope for the future game line didn't come with rape ghosts or the playtest leak, it came when Morke said that he wanted every character's daiklave to contain a larger charm tree than 2e core Solar melee got. That is a spergy bullshit event horizon beyond which I don't have the capacity to deal with. You know, having read and used the playtest leak, I can honestly say this is a design decision that works much better in practice than it looks on paper. As Ferrinus said, the basic idea is that each cascade has a few lynchpin charms, often grouped into neat, discrete sub-trees based on function (ie, Brawl has a 'punch hard' subtree and 'grapple hard' subtree, which themselves fork out into 'punch harder'/'also block hard' and 'grapple harder'/'toss folks around like ragdolls'). A small investment in one of these offers a huge change in functionality, allowing you to play the game at a level no mortal could - but then there are smaller, more incremental boosts that still measurably improve capability, but aren't quite as fundamental to playstyle. The net effect is that to get Good At Something, you are encouraged to buy some of the charms, but not ALL the charms unless you're really into that because otherwise it's more bang-for-buck to grab some lynchpins from another Ability. If anything, I'm reminded of games such as Etrian Odyssey IV, where no one character can do everything, or even everything within their class' remit, and the big choice is between basic competence at lots of useful, grab-bag skills, or moderate-to-extreme investment in a few at substantial opportunity cost but godDAMN are you good at what you do. That said, there's definitely some cruft - areas where a little more compactness and less redundancy wouldn't hurt (looking at you, Craft and Performance), but it's not a fundamentally-bad idea the way that, say, 2E perfect defenses or most of Scroll of the Monk were.
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Sep 25, 2014 18:55
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