Quote from: danbuter;457900I thought the first few Exalted 1e books were cool. But they went more and more anime and less and less Greek myth.

Quote from: Peregrin;457780If you could summon Jon Chung, he would rip apart mechanically, but I don't know if he has an account here.

Suffice it to say that there are points where using the system becomes pointless.  Wounds don't matter because most attacks can knock all of them out in one hit if they get through defenses, so combat focuses on making sure no one breaks through.  Defenses mainly use Essence, and so Essence becomes the de-facto "HP" system for when a combat is about to get ended.  Unfortunately that fact is tied to a system that uses the concept of "Perfect Defenses" and "Perfect Attacks" -- you spend the Essence, the attack/defense auto-succeeds.  What happens here is that whoever can pull off the most Perfect Defenses is usually the winner.  And so mechanically savvy players focus on building monstrosities that are focused solely on assuming everything is out to kill them in one hit -- Paranoia Combat builds -- a lot of them using loopholes or specific powers to regenerate Essence as quickly as possible in combat.  If played by knowledgeable players, the better mechanical build will almost always win.

It could've been much better represented/abstracted if it wasn't relying on the base assumptions of the d10 system, and if more than half the powers out there weren't written by people who didn't understand the fundamentals of the system.  They're trying to "patch" some of the more broken bits now, but it seems like too little, too late.

Amusingly, the combat system works pretty well for heroic mortals who don't use charms/magic, but once you get past a certain power-level, it just breaks down.