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Stephenls posted:There was the additional problem that houseruling itself was deeply difficult, with the obvious, simple houserules inevitably breaking things elsewhere. "Don't touch perfects until you address lethality" was a catchphrase on the Exalted forum for most of 2e. Yeah. It was a terrible tangle and required a thorough redesign, which isn't something most people can just sit down and do for their home campaign.
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Jan 28, 2021 19:30
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LatwPIAT posted:Yeah. It was a terrible tangle and required a thorough redesign, which isn't something most people can just sit down and do for their home campaign. Agreed. I can not imagine dropping an Exalted rulebook (any edition) in front of a group of players and saying "roll up characters, figure it out."
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Jan 28, 2021 19:48
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Falstaff posted:Has John Wick ever created a functional game on his lonesome? I remember getting frustrated at a number of points of utter incoherence in Houses of the Blooded and eventually just walking away from a game mid-campaign. He seems to just view games rules as "good enough" when they work in his head and then never examines or stress tests them in any meaningful way. Along these lines, it seems really weird to me that pretty much none of the major game designers in the RPG industry seem to have had any idea what the hell they were doing until about 1999. Like I keep looking back at RPG designers from the 80s and 90s and even the ones working on the most influential properties in the industry seem to have just been making everything up as they went without any sort of deeper theory or philosophy...
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Jan 28, 2021 19:53
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Cessna posted:Agreed. I can not imagine dropping an Exalted rulebook (any edition) in front of a group of players and saying "roll up characters, figure it out." When I got my physical copy of Exalted 3rd in I flipped through it once and just put it away forever. I played so much 1st edition, but I can't live that life no more.
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Jan 28, 2021 20:02
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Some time during 2nd edition I got so sick of Exalted-the-system that I just hacked the whole thing into Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. Works pretty well! And I'm sure if I put the effort in I could make it work even better in Cortex Prime.
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Jan 28, 2021 20:27
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KingKalamari posted:Along these lines, it seems really weird to me that pretty much none of the major game designers in the RPG industry seem to have had any idea what the hell they were doing until about 1999. Like I keep looking back at RPG designers from the 80s and 90s and even the ones working on the most influential properties in the industry seem to have just been making everything up as they went without any sort of deeper theory or philosophy... I honestly don't think that the framework for thinking about game design from a human psychology standpoint was very well developed until pretty drat recently. Some computer game devs were probably doing it before it got big, but the first time I ever remember hearing about research and theory-based game design in any kind of game (whether rpg, board, or video game) was the first Halo. It was a big deal at the time that Microsoft was actually doing research on what made video games fun and then doing that intentionally.
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Jan 28, 2021 20:41
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LatwPIAT posted:This was expensive, and could only be done/could be done cheapest by spending Willpower points, which was also the currency you used to activate your other cool abilities. And also was the 'damage' for social combat, which caused all sorts of weird side-effects.
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Jan 28, 2021 20:51
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KingKalamari posted:Along these lines, it seems really weird to me that pretty much none of the major game designers in the RPG industry seem to have had any idea what the hell they were doing until about 1999. Like I keep looking back at RPG designers from the 80s and 90s and even the ones working on the most influential properties in the industry seem to have just been making everything up as they went without any sort of deeper theory or philosophy... People are still just making it up with no formal theory or taught skill behind it. There is no continuation of institutional knowledge in the industry, meaning every lesson, every brilliance, and every guiding principle gets discovered and forgotten over and over again with each new crop of game designers. Best practices aren't preserved or highlighted, and when theory does get written down it tends to end up in insular communities, dead forums, and obscure 'zines that went out of business in 1998 with no way to get back-issues. And when a book does get written and it does see enough success to be known, it's Play Dirty and basically every piece of advice within is terrible, because the industry is so ignorant of what makes a game good it doesn't even realise that it's actually bad at game design. It's terrible.
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Jan 28, 2021 20:56
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If any game needed just plain ol' hit points and lots of them, it's Exalted. The PCs are all basically SNES-era Final Fantasy characters anyway. Reminder that First Edition had a sidebar that encouraged everyone to take Ox-Body Technique just to survive combats because default health levels were awful.
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Jan 28, 2021 21:00
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Every time I read anything about Exalted, I think back to the time that White Wolf ran a "Graduate Your Game" promo for people to trade in their D&D 3e corebooks for Exalted corebooks. Converting people from one terribly designed system to another terribly designed system with even less rigour. I have no idea why they felt they had to build such an epic-scale game on the foundation of Storyteller. Health Levels, at least, could have been an easy fix. Falstaff posted:Has John Wick ever created a functional game on his lonesome? Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Jan 28, 2021 |
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Jan 28, 2021 21:00
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Falstaff posted:Has John Wick ever created a functional game on his lonesome? I remember getting frustrated at a number of points of utter incoherence in Houses of the Blooded and eventually just walking away from a game mid-campaign. He seems to just view games rules as "good enough" when they work in his head and then never examines or stress tests them in any meaningful way. This is more or less ruinous to the way FATE Aspects are actually meant to work (as up-front, defining features of the character, with the compels being levers out there to play with as the fiction demands).
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Jan 28, 2021 21:10
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GreenMetalSun posted:'It's easier to defend than attack, so turtle while throwing out as many lethal attacks as possible' is not a super hard concept to grasp. 3E sorta tried to fix this by making your initiative your hit points, but I admit I haven't run it, it seems like a nightmare to track. Initiative tracking ends up being pretty easy. Ex3's combat system is very good, easily my favorite of the three editions. Its problem is that you very quickly start having to do an enormous amount of prep for any fight that isn't trivial, because the supply of pregen antagonists is woefully inadequate. I would happily delay the rest of the Exalted 3E line for years - or even cancel things like Alchemicals and Infernals - if they would just put out a Monster Manual that could keep up with Solars to Essence 5.
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Jan 28, 2021 21:33
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One of my major complaints about 3e was that there's just far too much of it. It seemed to take the idea that there was massive amounts of charm bloat applied to combat and nothing elsewhere as an invitation to bloat a bunch of other charm trees. I heard that DBs and Lunars were better about this but Solars have always been the core of the game and they got hosed up hard.
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Jan 28, 2021 21:46
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Maxwell Lord posted:Reminder that First Edition had a sidebar that encouraged everyone to take Ox-Body Technique just to survive combats because default health levels were awful. I have never understood the reasoning behind this, it seemed so half-assed.
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Jan 28, 2021 22:00
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Notahippie posted:I honestly don't think that the framework for thinking about game design from a human psychology standpoint was very well developed until pretty drat recently. Some computer game devs were probably doing it before it got big, but the first time I ever remember hearing about research and theory-based game design in any kind of game (whether rpg, board, or video game) was the first Halo. It was a big deal at the time that Microsoft was actually doing research on what made video games fun and then doing that intentionally. At the same time, I feel like even if they didn't have the terminology or psychological understanding of what they were doing, video games still demonstrated an understanding of design principles far before the RPG industry at large did. The first screen of the first level of Super Mario Bros does a really good job at deliberately familiarizing the player with the basic mechanics of the game without ever having to explain anything, and that was definitely a deliberate choice on the part of the designers. LatwPIAT posted:People are still just making it up with no formal theory or taught skill behind it. There is no continuation of institutional knowledge in the industry, meaning every lesson, every brilliance, and every guiding principle gets discovered and forgotten over and over again with each new crop of game designers. Best practices aren't preserved or highlighted, and when theory does get written down it tends to end up in insular communities, dead forums, and obscure 'zines that went out of business in 1998 with no way to get back-issues. And when a book does get written and it does see enough success to be known, it's Play Dirty and basically every piece of advice within is terrible, because the industry is so ignorant of what makes a game good it doesn't even realise that it's actually bad at game design. I think another thing that contributes to this state of affairs is the fact that so much of the actual core of play in tabletop RPGs exists in a purely theoretical space. With something like a video game the developer needs to have a certain baseline skill level in programming to actually create a sellable final product. Tabletop RPGs, on the other hand, are ultimately just a set of rules and guidelines to play a purely abstract game of make believe, so there's a lot less of an expectation on the developers to put actual thought into what we're doing. We all know how to make things up, so it's much easier for the end user to improvise or fix problems in an RPG than it would be for them to do the same for a video game.
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Jan 28, 2021 22:01
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Kestral posted:Initiative tracking ends up being pretty easy. Ex3's combat system is very good, easily my favorite of the three editions. Its problem is that you very quickly start having to do an enormous amount of prep for any fight that isn't trivial, because the supply of pregen antagonists is woefully inadequate. I would happily delay the rest of the Exalted 3E line for years - or even cancel things like Alchemicals and Infernals - if they would just put out a Monster Manual that could keep up with Solars to Essence 5. Although there were shortcuts available in 1ed and 2ed, my experiences as a GM point to this being basically true for prior editions as well. Circle of Solars v. any other Exalts in any non-trivial combat situation took astronomical amounts of prep and systems mastery (the basis of which being managing a massive amount of charms and effects... heaven help you if you have signature combos/group builds.)
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Jan 28, 2021 22:07
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One of my favorite types of books is books of essays on writing. I don't care about about whole books by one author, because they're rarely good (see, e.g., Save the Cat), but collections of essays are good. I wish there were more books by a collection of authors on game design, what makes games good. Like lumpley or the Cortex Hackers guide but writ large.
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Jan 28, 2021 22:09
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Kestral posted:Initiative tracking ends up being pretty easy. Ex3's combat system is very good, easily my favorite of the three editions. Its problem is that you very quickly start having to do an enormous amount of prep for any fight that isn't trivial, because the supply of pregen antagonists is woefully inadequate. I would happily delay the rest of the Exalted 3E line for years - or even cancel things like Alchemicals and Infernals - if they would just put out a Monster Manual that could keep up with Solars to Essence 5. There is a monster manual - two, actually, but they currently exist as a bunch of individual antagonists you can buy on DTRPG. I don't know about hitting E5 but there's a bunch of things like giant krakens, chaos behemoths, and powerful enemy Exalted in the Adversaries of the Righteous and Hundred Devils Night Parade lines. The devs have apparently sent those to layout to be made into collections, so you'll get your wish (hopefully mechanically well-constructed) soon enough!
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Jan 28, 2021 22:31
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spectralent posted:One of my major complaints about 3e was that there's just far too much of it. It seemed to take the idea that there was massive amounts of charm bloat applied to combat and nothing elsewhere as an invitation to bloat a bunch of other charm trees. Exalted absolutely needed something like HP. The system in Scion 2E would have worked in some form too, where you may only have a few "wounds" but it's rare for an attack to do more than one wound at a time, instead the attack will do a wound AND ALSO blow up where you were standing and move you down the initative track and also now you have the status effect "Unmoxious" and "Disrespectful to Dirt."
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Jan 28, 2021 23:08
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nacon posted:Although there were shortcuts available in 1ed and 2ed, my experiences as a GM point to this being basically true for prior editions as well. Circle of Solars v. any other Exalts in any non-trivial combat situation took astronomical amounts of prep and systems mastery (the basis of which being managing a massive amount of charms and effects... heaven help you if you have signature combos/group builds.) Yep, I ran years' worth of Ex1 and Ex2 both, but only after they had their main supplements filled out, so at least the charm sets for antagonists existed. Ex3 will get there eventually, but it's really only well-supported up to Essence 3 at the moment. Joe Slowboat posted:There is a monster manual - two, actually, but they currently exist as a bunch of individual antagonists you can buy on DTRPG. I don't know about hitting E5 but there's a bunch of things like giant krakens, chaos behemoths, and powerful enemy Exalted in the Adversaries of the Righteous and Hundred Devils Night Parade lines. I followed those as they were released, but they weren't sufficient, especially once Solars are around Essence 4.
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Jan 28, 2021 23:30
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I can't complain about Exalted's lack of a monster manual too much, since it's been very profitable for me. (Please buy my stuff.) But yeah, I don't really get why they aren't more aggressive about getting an organized monster manual out there, aside from their entire content pipe being broken.
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Jan 28, 2021 23:36
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Kestral posted:I followed those as they were released, but they weren't sufficient, especially once Solars are around Essence 4. Hopefully the gm advice book that is coming Soon will have advice on that too!
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Jan 29, 2021 00:12
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Maxwell Lord posted:Reminder that First Edition had a sidebar that encouraged everyone to take Ox-Body Technique just to survive combats because default health levels were awful. The whole line had some pretty serious problems with giving you a bunch of weird fun flavorful options and then making them completely useless. "Here are all these fun splats! You will never get to play them. Just make a Solar with a daiklave and lots of dots in Don't Die."
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Jan 29, 2021 00:21
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One of the constant problems with Exalted is that NPCs are insanely complicated precisely because they are built with the same rules as PCs. Every time they promise to come up with a simplified system for NPCs, and every time the 'simplfied system' is just a list of NPC stat templates that are still just as complex as PCs. 3e is arguably the worst here for it because there's a ton of charms that close the door on asymmetrical NPC stats. You can't, say, just make NPC rolls a static thing because there's a fair number of charms that say things like 'when your opponent rolls a 4, you can spend a mote to remove a success from their roll' and such. To make NPCs simpler you'd first have to redo a bunch of charms and systems
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Jan 29, 2021 00:51
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I was excited about Ex3 at first but I just lack the will to learn a new game along with all those loving charms when the pdf/books are still a bitch to navigate and they've only managed to make people do more work in order to play.
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Jan 29, 2021 01:23
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potatocubed posted:Some time during 2nd edition I got so sick of Exalted-the-system that I just hacked the whole thing into Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. Goon and superlative GM Old Kentucky Shark ran me and some others in an Exalted game with a Marvel Heroic Roleplaying hack and it absolutely worked a treat. (I really miss that game.)
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Jan 29, 2021 03:59
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Honestly, good on John Wick for totally bamboozling Chaosium into taking on the insane burden of finishing the 7th Sea books they don't have money for, as well as an entire other game line set in Not Asia. All while all the biggest fans have already payed for all of it as well as abandoning the game totally. Even at its initial wave of hype on release before reality set in the game didn't have any interest beyond backers. Huh I totally forgot about the Not-Asia expansion. Did that end up making its funding goal on kickstarter? People were definitely a lot less enthused for that than the first 7th Sea kickstarter.
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Jan 29, 2021 04:02
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Exalted 3 sometimes brings to mind Dungeon World. It's supposed to be a reinvention and rediscovery of a prelapsarian game, and it even does a lot of cool new things, but it fucks itself up with a bunch of legacy bits that I'm firmly convinced were largely held onto for aesthetic, nostalgic reasons*, and not because they're vital to "the Exalted experience" unless you're into that same D&D-type poison where "six Ability scores is what makes it D&D; nine Attributes and 25(ish) Abilities is what makes it Exalted." * I'm sure Holden and especially John could squat out a few thousand words that sound like a considered, practical justification of that bullshit, but "BP/XP are the good rules you think you don't need" so lmao into infinity. Nuns with Guns posted:Huh I totally forgot about the Not-Asia expansion. Did that end up making its funding goal on kickstarter? People were definitely a lot less enthused for that than the first 7th Sea kickstarter. Oh yeah, it still made over $200k. EDIT: The last KS update was in October and it sounds like it's in layout. Probably still is, but in any case likely close to shipping. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Jan 29, 2021 |
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Jan 29, 2021 04:19
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Whybird posted:Ah, but you see a competent crowdfunder will know when to ignore pledges as written. Just wanted to say that I really appreciate this post.
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Jan 29, 2021 04:33
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That Old Tree posted:Oh yeah, it still made over $200k. Dang, well good luck to them and all. That was something that really sucked about the 7th Sea 2e initiative. Like, they were actually fixing a lot of the stupid poo poo about the setting, like the incoherent map, adding in some more nation stuff including a whole new extra not-Europe nation, hiring BIPOC to do not-Africa and not-New World supplements, and in general polishing the solid lore 1e bits up. That whole end of it looked great. And then it all nose-dived into the ocean.
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Jan 29, 2021 05:24
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Kestral posted:Initiative tracking ends up being pretty easy. Ex3's combat system is very good, easily my favorite of the three editions. Its problem is that you very quickly start having to do an enormous amount of prep for any fight that isn't trivial, because the supply of pregen antagonists is woefully inadequate. I would happily delay the rest of the Exalted 3E line for years - or even cancel things like Alchemicals and Infernals - if they would just put out a Monster Manual that could keep up with Solars to Essence 5. That's good to know. I was tying to write some rolling/tracking macros for it in roll20, but I don't have the energy to care about/fix/write homebrew for Exalted like I used to. It used to be my favorite game (see username), but Morke and Holden really killed any love/goodwill I had towards it.
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Jan 29, 2021 06:23
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Cessna posted:I have never understood the reasoning behind this, it seemed so half-assed. If I remember correctly it was also incorrect.
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Jan 29, 2021 07:16
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hyphz posted:If I remember correctly it was also incorrect. Yeah, numerically an extra health level or two would do nothing for you in Ex2, and you could have spent that charm on something like a no-sell defense or a surprise negator or, if you're getting serious, some element of the filtering system (where you have multiple redundant defenses you can choose to activate at different points in the attack process, so that you can first use your free defenses and hope to survive that way, and if those fail you can spend effort to no-sell. You didn't want to only do this, because later step defenses wouldn't protect you from potentially lethal effects like poison or other attack riders. Second edition was bad, and even the 2.5 errata only made it somewhat playable as opposed to a huge mess. I still ran it for years in college but I was working against the system and had to discuss the detente on optimization with my players to make it work.) In Ex3 Ox-Body charms are more useful because of the new combat system, but I still probably wouldn't go for them. For the record, Ex3 is a huge improvement on Ex2, mostly. It has a handful of subsystems that are either divisive (craft), missing (bureaucracy and management) or such garbage that I can't really imagine anyone sat down and worked out the play loop after writing it (naval combat). But combat, social influence, sorcery, and a wide array of other core systems are crunchy but fun and tactically interesting. There's still some issues, of course, but it's really like night and day, and while the system is crunchy you really don't need to delve deep into the charms to run it (though delving deep will give players more options, obviously). I'm really looking forward to running Dragon-Blooded, or playing as one.
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Jan 29, 2021 08:35
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Joe Slowboat posted:In Ex3 Ox-Body charms are more useful because of the new combat system, but I still probably wouldn't go for them. Yeah Ox Bodies are in that classic spot of not being very exciting but being so incredibly strong mechanically that everybody should probably get at least one. I've never played anything other than Ex3 but your summary is accurate to my experience of it.
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Jan 29, 2021 18:06
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I only have dim memories of playing a bunch of 1e and 2e Exalted, but one thing I do remember is that after a while everyone at the table realized that Ox-Body was a sucker's bet, because if you were taking damage at all, you were dying. Waste of a charm that could have gone into perfect defenses and an essence engine.
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Jan 29, 2021 18:20
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LatwPIAT posted:People are still just making it up with no formal theory or taught skill behind it. There is no continuation of institutional knowledge in the industry, meaning every lesson, every brilliance, and every guiding principle gets discovered and forgotten over and over again with each new crop of game designers. Best practices aren't preserved or highlighted, and when theory does get written down it tends to end up in insular communities, dead forums, and obscure 'zines that went out of business in 1998 with no way to get back-issues. And when a book does get written and it does see enough success to be known, it's Play Dirty and basically every piece of advice within is terrible, because the industry is so ignorant of what makes a game good it doesn't even realise that it's actually bad at game design. Reminds me how I first learnt game design talking to Raph Koster and others on old forums back in the 90s and early 00s. So many awesome game design conversations lost to time. Like tears in rain. Couldn't help myself
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Jan 29, 2021 18:22
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EthanSteele posted:Yeah Ox Bodies are in that classic spot of not being very exciting but being so incredibly strong mechanically that everybody should probably get at least one. Which would be the opposite of their 2e role if they weren't incredibly boring and useless in 2e! But in 2e taking one was such a lost opportunity to take charms that could keep you alive that it was a complete trap for new players, with a sidebar to encourage them to step on the landmine.
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Jan 29, 2021 20:16
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Joe Slowboat posted:Which would be the opposite of their 2e role if they weren't incredibly boring and useless in 2e! But in 2e taking one was such a lost opportunity to take charms that could keep you alive that it was a complete trap for new players, with a sidebar to encourage them to step on the landmine. My favorite will always be the 3E sidebar that advises players that Abilities are cheaper to buy with bonus points while Charms are cheaper to buy with real XP, so players should invest in more Abilities at chargen, but which pointedly does not advise players that low Attributes are cheaper to raise than high Attributes after chargen, so players should make sure to buy some high scores and some low scores rather than a bunch of middling scores.
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Jan 29, 2021 20:55
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Ferrinus posted:My favorite will always be the 3E sidebar that advises players that Abilities are cheaper to buy with bonus points while Charms are cheaper to buy with real XP, so players should invest in more Abilities at chargen, but which pointedly does not advise players that low Attributes are cheaper to raise than high Attributes after chargen, so players should make sure to buy some high scores and some low scores rather than a bunch of middling scores. The only alternative would be giving you the bad rules that you think you want.
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Jan 29, 2021 21:06
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theironjef posted:I only have dim memories of playing a bunch of 1e and 2e Exalted, but one thing I do remember is that after a while everyone at the table realized that Ox-Body was a sucker's bet, because if you were taking damage at all, you were dying. Waste of a charm that could have gone into perfect defenses and an essence engine. What did they eventually start calling it in Exalted? Paranoia combat?
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Jan 30, 2021 00:16
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