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I have very little investment in Exalted, but I find it odd that, on the other end of the proverbial hallway from 3e's development, the Demon: the Descent kickstarter released the (admittedly close to final) draft print of the entire book, for everybody, and this got them showered with hype, praise, tweak suggestions, and a general level of healthy discourse. I know I certainly bought a higher tier specifically because they did that, and ended up way, way more excited for the game after I read it. When Deus Ex: Human Revolution was coming out, you couldn't find a bigger group of grognards and poo poo-stirrers absolutely determined that it'd be Hitler's own video game, worse than DX2, and personally responsible for raising the mortality rate of the world. Then the first act of the game's test build got leaked, and the vast majority of them had their opinion turned 180 after hands-on experience with the product. When I first heard that 3e was starting to leak, I actually thought specifically of this, and the theory that it was intentionally leaked - until I also heard that they're playing whack-a-mole across the entire internet, an endeavor that will probably prove pointless the second someone wises up and just puts the drat thing on a torrent site instead of direct fileshare websites. I understand that the rules may be in a rough state right now, and subject to change, but...yeah, Gilok's Molyneux reference seems sort of apt. Hype only goes so far when you absolutely refuse to back it up beyond token concessions, and it shouldn't be surprising someone inside the compound got sick of it and tried to make a break for the outside with the goods.
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Jun 14, 2014 04:27
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Stephenls posted:Holden and John flat out do not have enough time to process the amount of playtest feedback an open playtest would generate. We have, to my knowledge, as many playtest groups as we can manage. I appreciate all your posts, and your engagement with this thread, so don't take this as a personal attack. I can smell the weariness behind some of your posts, and I sympathize. Just the other day someone else in Onyx Path posted this in the World of Darkness thread about the upcoming Werewolf redesign: DigitalRaven posted:We're not planning to kickstart at this point, but getting material out in front of people so they've got an idea of what we're doing and where we're coming from is really goddamn helpful. The feedback from people who read the open development stuff is informing what we do just the same as playtest feedback. Someone else, doing an extremely similar project in the same company, is singing the praises of something that requires effectively no effort and allows you to, as Transient People says, let the community input a ton of voices hashing out problems and ideas, letting the most detailed debates gain traction. The WoD blog manages to have a weekly(?) column about topics the community wants to hear about an upcoming line, with discussions in the comments that the developers occasionally chime in on. That's the key part - occasionally. Yes, if you're approaching this as a two-man job trying to monitor every single piece of information and discussion on the entire internet, of course that's impossible, but that's not how you actually do it in practice unless you've got 72 hours in your days. I would think monitoring nothing but a large amount of specific playtests, their results, and feedback would be way more complicated and time consuming than throwing it out to the wild for general discussion while doing stress tests with specific playtesting.
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Jun 14, 2014 05:32
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Ferrinus posted:Feats and prestige classes are traps in games whose content actually consists of spells and powers. But charms are where Exalted's mechanics live. They're not sapping attention you could otherwise be spending on some other, more representative game mechanic. They're a major part of how the setting reveals itself to you. I defy you to explain to me why you need several thousand words of Sail charms to understand the setting.
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Jan 19, 2015 08:55
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Mendrian posted:Charms should be chunky, awesome moves that impress and inspire. If they fail to inspire, they fail as Charms. Meat and potatoes +1 to appraisal and distilling checks are pretty dull and need to go. This is why I specifically used Sail charms  I have a lot of windmills I tilt at Exalted over, but I understand Charms as a way to get across  superpowers and finishing moves and poo poo. That's what they should be. The fact that they're overrun by +/- 1s and 2s to specific actions in specific situations and drown in their own fiddliness is where the problems come in. If Solars are supposed to be The Best At Doing [Thing] if they're focused on it, why the gently caress are so many Charms just tiny nudges to the probability of a roll? Contrast that with the occasional (or not so occasional) Charm that completely changes the rules like Perfect Defenses or the giant tire fire that is Martial Arts and you wonder why most of the word count is even there when the minority of super-Charms are the only things you're ever going to need to buy.For instance, if you're The Best At Sailing, you shouldn't have twenty Charms that make your ship a little faster or a little more maneuverable and then two Charms that are actually impressive. The entry level should be something like "gently caress the wind, gently caress currents, I go where I want, I only roll when I'm actively being opposed by supernatural forces because I'm just that good," and escalate up a shorter tree from there. When I see supposedly tree-defining Charms merely stacking together effects that add or subtract a few fractions of a single success from the average result of a roll, I practically hear the squeaky, fart-like disappointment of a deflating balloon.
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Jan 19, 2015 09:27
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Rand Brittain posted:That actually sounds like the kind of Charms that ruined 2e, because a Charm like that obviates a bunch of sailing-based challenges and gives you less opportunities to show off your mad sailing skills instead of more. Good point, that was a bit reactionary of me.
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Jan 19, 2015 22:52
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Just to interrupt lorechat, I got my hands on the leak and tried to whip up a character, having not really given Exalted much more than the occasional checkup since the early days of 2e. My brain summarily pretzeled itself under the combo of picking 15 charms out of 100,000 words and two-dozen-odd categories, and the horrible mutated Traveling Salesman problem that is non-equivalent purchasing power pre- and post-chargen that should have been left in the ditch it was dumped in ten years ago. See, I could have spent a while solving the logic puzzle this posed while/before reading through a mountain of Charms, trying to figure out which ones I'd actually end up using, or which ones were secretly so necessary that I'd be hosed if I didn't take them. It wasn't an impossible task. It just required a a disproportionate amount of effort compared to creating a character in nearly every other system I've ever messed with, and I've got very little tolerance for that sort of poo poo nowadays. It vividly reminded me of DND 3.0 - sure, the stuff at the end of the road might be awesome, but unless you've already got system mastery, you're not going to get there any time soon, if at all. All I wanted to do was make a dude who could write down burns so sick that anybody who read them would scream out how badly they got owned before keeling over dead, and the game got in the way of its own promises.
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Feb 8, 2015 02:59
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Mexcillent posted:Reading over the leak and making a bunch of characters I kind of realized something: I hate a lot of the setting  No really, I'm interested in your reasons since I think we might share them.
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Feb 8, 2015 08:43
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Friend of mine showed me a list of charms by required Ability rating (1/2/3/4/5)quote:Archery: 0-1-3-4-17 Putting aside the absurdity of nearly 760 different charms, and the hilarious disparity between, say, Craft and War, I suppose it's nice to get it written out that yes, you might as well not get a stat in anything you're remotely interested in doing without boosting it to 5 dots with BP in character creation, because otherwise you'll need to spend absurd amounts of experience to get more than a tiny sliver of a charm tree. Like, why even have stat requirements if, in practice, you're presenting a binary choice of "Is/Is Not At 5 Dots"?
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Feb 12, 2015 08:45
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Someone ran the numbers for familiars when the leak came out, and a starting (Supernal) beastmaster with a gorilla familiar can have it rout a max-sized battlegroup with an average leader without personally lifting a finger, and beat the poo poo out of most enemies in a grapple. A single tyrant lizard with maximum Survival buffs and an Essence 5 handler can outfight a War 5 Essence 5 Solar with several dream team battlegroups. Adding Ride basically turns it into the Harlem Globetrotters to the War Solar's Washington Generals.
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Mar 11, 2015 01:31
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zeal posted:i'm pretty okay with this, at least same
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Mar 11, 2015 07:36
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Ronwayne posted:The Bronze Faction did nothing wrong. This is also why I think Limit Breaks However, let's change the paradigm, and make the Great Curse work by dangling incentives in front of players. Oh, sure, you don't have to act like a complete rear end in a top hat. Nobody's saying that, Mr. Solar. But, hey, maybe if you act like an rear end in a top hat ~just this once~ you can reap the mechanical reward and use it to do what you really want to. No real pressure to act like an rear end in a top hat again...until things get difficult. Or you figure it's worth the tradeoff. Or hey, you were already gonna act kind of like an rear end in a top hat anyway, might as well step it up to the point where you get a reward for doing more or less what you were going to anyway. And wow, look at how effective being an rear end in a top hat can be! Is it REALLY so bad to be an rear end in a top hat a little more often if it gives you such an edge? And just like that, players unwittingly (or wittingly) re-enact, IC and OOC, the entire conceit of the Great Curse. It's not the Primordials yelling NO FUN ALLOWED if the number gets too high, it's becoming inured to the consequences of your actions, and slowly going "Ehh, gently caress it" - if you even realize it's happening.
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Mar 13, 2015 01:34
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Ronwayne posted:I managed to get one of those psychic law enforcement hunter guys through an entire year and a half game without losing morality despite being attacked by cthuloid monstrosities and super Jason Freddy Krueger Jigsaw nonstop and also refusing to let the party do anything too grody (at least in my line of sight). By the end it was kinda like playing a less grimdark 40k Inquisitor. To be fair, most of the rest of the hunters were more or less decent (if often deeply crazy) people at heart, you brought at least 80 of those boxes of damage on yourself with your rampant abuse of psychic powers, and would have keeled over dead partway through the game if our Storyteller didn't have our superscience Contact whip up magical brain drugs that meant you could heal your subdural hemorrhages faster than you induced them. And the US Air Force "interdicting" (blowing up) the private jet liner of the North American member of the Tremere's Council of Seven over the Atlantic, killing the Tremere in the middle of his smack talk over the phone, may be one of my favorite plot highlights in any game I've ever played.
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Mar 13, 2015 21:44
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Stephenls posted:Oh, hey all. I wouldn't have wished Ex3's workflow on my most hated enemy. I hope you get your footing under you as soon as you can, dude.
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Jul 21, 2015 23:34
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Nessus posted:My impression is that these guys for a variety of reasons, ranging from Morke's problems with Larry and Barry to "???" have broken the usual mould of how these products go. Almost every single OPP release since EX3's funding has avoided the sort of Sisyphean clusterfuck that EX3 dove into - and those very few that came close are only close in the sense of astronomical scales. EX3 has been huffing its own farts in the corner furthest from the rest of the company for a long while now.
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Aug 11, 2015 04:34
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From all evidence, the Exalted department of Onyx Path seems to be some sort of Lord of the Flies situation where all the people good at PR, game design, and basic editing died in the plane crash, and anything resembling such things is there purely on accident as the survivors attempt to mimic what they vaguely remember all the nerds talking about.
Daeren fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Oct 9, 2015 |
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Oct 9, 2015 22:15
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team overhead smash posted:Monday Meeting Notes: Ex 3 core book – From RichT: Maria still inputting revised Pg XXs after we discovered a page number shift in the book mid-way through due to Maria actually reducing the page count by two pages. Once she’s done we send to CCP for approval of changes- one of their required changes was having all the Pg XXs filled in before they’d give final approval, which is why we’ve been fixated on the XXs. After their OK, backer PDFs will be sent out. Holden also mentioned that his OCD has slowed down his end of things as he has had to restart the process repeatedly to confirm his already assigned XX page numbers. If this were any other publishing industry I think these people's heads would be on spikes as examples by now.
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Oct 13, 2015 21:15
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Yeah, if this was a fly-by-night Kickstarter by some dude who'd never so much as opened a layout file before, I can at least understand "oh god what am I doing  " delays.There's people on staff who have been doing this for over a decade. I've seen people, professional and amateur, post at least four or five ways to have set this up to make the process take less than an hour, or speed it up if they're deadset on doing it the current way. If I tried to pull the poo poo they're doing in my temp job, I'd be thrown out on my rear end hard enough to shatter my pelvis. To reiterate, "Oops, page references are hard and time consuming" is an excuse so bad that it's either actively covering up for some sort of behind the scenes reason, or the people in charge of the process are so staggeringly incompetent that, absent of context, the only reason I could use to explain the fact they still have jobs is Christlike mercy from their superiors. That or pictures of a CCP executive having sex in/with a pile of EVE money.
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Oct 14, 2015 00:36
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Crion posted:lot going on with this font Roadie posted:My first impression: It's pretty, but given the length of time this has been stewing, I'm unimpressed when I look in the Table of Contents and see obvious typos ("SnakeStyle", "Sorcerous Workings4") and missing entries (where's Archery?) literally within 10 seconds of opening the PDF. RPZip posted:Page number references are wrong, too (Chapter Six: page 250. Chapter Six, Presentation Format: page 182). Exactly how long did layout take again?
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Oct 22, 2015 20:38
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SunAndSpring posted:The art in question: Oooooh my God. I think the top right is CK2 art too, but I can't be sure.
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Oct 22, 2015 21:42
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RiotGearEpsilon posted:I've done editing work before. It is incredible and humiliating the sort of stuff you stop seeing after you've gone over a text two or three times. But hey, that's why this is a pre-release document, right? I mean, this is literally why it's sent out a bit early. You can report these errors and they'll get fixed. Yeah, I've made huge editing mistakes on seven page report, I'm honestly not surprised that there are editing fuckups in a seven hundred page RPG manual. Screwing up the index, though, is some next level poo poo.
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Oct 22, 2015 22:03
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The issue is that Exalted attracts numerous groups of people due to being such a behemoth. People who enjoy incredibly elaborate, crunchy rules interactions might appreciate you trimming bloat, but others might get grouchy because they're actually just subscribed to the more-is-more philosophy, and trimming down Charm bloat is directly attacking what makes Exalted Exalted to them. Every weird little mechanical atavism is gonna have someone willing to die for its honor. Restructuring or altering the fluff would get even more of a division - I'm sure everybody in here has at least one change they'd like to see in their ideal version of Exalted, and that a lot of those changes are mutually exclusive. Basically, if you're going to make anything as a branch of Exalted, say "gently caress it" and do whatever you think is the best way to fix it, because God knows you're going to piss somebody off anyway.
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Oct 27, 2015 20:49
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Thug Lessons posted:I think you'll find that by removing bloat, redundancies, nonsensical legacy mechanics and outright poor design you'll end up attracting more people than you lose because they're hardcore Agile Dragonfly Blade fans. Oh, I agree with you completely. Hell, if I could be assed, ~my dream Exalted~ is one that discards most of the agonized attempts to be a tabletop version of some Magic the Gathering/Yomi frankenstein and tries to make a new design based on actually capturing the themes the game says it's trying to go for, thus immediately pissing off basically everybody.
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Oct 27, 2015 21:29
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I prefer the first one. It's clean and immediately divides separate chunks of rules.
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Oct 30, 2015 07:34
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